


A Most Resilient Parasite

by madsthenerdygirl



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Autistic Jiya, But Then Again Mindfuckery Was Not My Goal, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Gun Violence, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, In Which Every Relationship is Pain, Inception AU, It's All About the Relationships Baby, Just So Much Pain, Lots of Pseudo-Deaths in This, M/M, Multi, Quite an Accomplishment, Smut, Somehow Lucy Manages to be More of a Mess in This Than Wyatt, This Does Not Live Up to the Mind Fuck of the First Film, Timeless Season Three References, Violence, We Got Painful Family Feels, We Got Painful Romance Feels, Wyatt and Lucy Do Not Work Without Flynn, and that's the tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-03-06 05:42:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18844792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madsthenerdygirl/pseuds/madsthenerdygirl
Summary: I say, “don’t think about love.” What are you thinking about?





	A Most Resilient Parasite

Lucy plugged her earphones in and emerged out into the street. It was a cold winter morning, the air crisp, the sky blue-gray. She always forgot how cold London was compared to San Francisco.

She took off at a light jog, glad she’d worn her Stanford hoodie. At first, there wasn’t anyone on the street with her—but then she heard footsteps behind her.

She turned. No one was there.

Lucy started running again—and so did the footsteps.

She sped up, panic setting in, filling her lungs like ice—the footsteps were closer now, she couldn’t seem to move, her legs just swimming uselessly through the air, a hand was wrapping around her throat—

“You can’t outrun me,” Amy whispered, and her hand squeezed tight, Lucy gasped, and then pain exploded as Amy ran the knife into her stomach—

Lucy woke up gasping, tears sliding down her face.

“Shit.” Wyatt was hovering over her. “Luce, Lucy, you okay? Lucy?”

Lucy sat up and twisted, dry heaving over the side of the lawn chair. Fuck. _Fuck_. It wasn’t the first time, she knew it wouldn’t be the last, but it always felt so real…

“It was Amy, wasn’t it?” Wyatt asked, his voice rough and dull.

Lucy sat back up and looked at him. “She’s… temperamental.”

Wyatt looked like he had a lot of thoughts to say to that, but he just clenched his jaw and looked away. Lucy wanted to reach out—once she would have without thinking about it—but somewhere along the way she’d forgotten how. And she didn’t know any longer how it would be received. Wyatt had been an open book, until he wasn’t.

Instead, she said nothing, and Wyatt said nothing, just getting up and going to get her a glass of water.

This would have been the part where Flynn would have said something. But then, Flynn wasn’t there anymore. It was just her and Wyatt now, the two of them, unable to find words, trapped in strained silences, reduced to giving and receiving orders.

Lucy got up on slightly shaking legs and accepted the glass of water. “Did we get the final reports on Christopher?”

Wyatt looked like he was straining himself not mocking her change of subject, but he just walked to the table and grabbed the pile of papers. “Yeah, they came in while you were under.”

“Then let's get started.”

 

* * *

 

Lucy sat in front of Denise Christopher—she was in Homeland now, fortunately never in the division that Lucy and Wyatt had worked with while they were a part of Project Morpheus.

Lucy had always found it to be a bit of an unoriginal name but she hadn’t been the one to choose it. Her mother had.

Denise Christopher was a good woman. A family woman, with a loving wife and two kids at home. Not the kind of person that Lucy liked stealing from. Ordinarily, Lucy wouldn’t have taken the job, but… well. Times were tough. She had to get the funds to get the information she needed—she had to start her life back over.

And so here she was, having dinner at Denise’s house, while Michelle joked about how Denise never brought colleagues home from work.

When Michelle got up and said, “I’ll leave you two to talk,” Denise looked over at Lucy.

“Now why don’t you tell me why you’re really here,” Denise said. She sat across the table from Lucy, just an ordinary dining room table, but it might as well have been a throne room.

“I have a proposition for you,” Lucy said. “You’re in the government. You know a lot of secrets. You’ve probably heard whispers about Project Morpheus.”

“The idea of lucid dreaming, yes,” Denise replied. “A way to train soldiers, to help them withstand torture, to push them to their limits. I heard it never caught on.”

“It caught on, all right,” Lucy replied. “A couple of people on the project stole the device used to facilitate the dreaming state and sold it to the highest bidder.”

She’d gotten a damn good price for it, too.

Wyatt had been furious when he’d found out they’d done that, but Lucy agreed with Flynn: there was no way to stop the military from using this on helpless soldier after soldier. They couldn’t possibly destroy all the blueprints, all her mother’s notes, all the tech.

The next best option was to steal it, make it known in enough of the dark corners of the world that the military couldn’t get away with it, couldn’t own it, couldn’t keep what happened to soldiers from being known. Take away their power and control.

It had been the first time she’d truly rebelled against her mother, and it had been liberating.

“That’s where I come in,” Lucy went on. “Powerful businessmen, they’re targets, of course they are. Mafiosos. But also… people like you. Government people. Those who will invade your mind through your dreams aren’t here for your wealth, they’re here for your secrets. And you, Agent Christopher, have quite a lot, I’m sure.”

Denise’s eyes glanced to the side just as Lucy said _secrets_ , and Lucy had to work to keep the smirk off her face.

_Gotcha._

“So what I do, is for a fee, I train you how to protect those secrets, even as you’re dreaming. We call it ‘militarization’. We take the instinct where you realize you’re dreaming and hone it, sharpen it, so that you can use your subconscious to recognize and get rid of intruders.”

Denise tilted her head. “It’s a generous offer.”

“Worth the time.”

“I can’t pay you what the drugs and the machine are worth.”

“We’re creative in our resources,” Lucy assured her.

Denise looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded, giving Lucy a small, subtle smile. “I appreciate your offer. You’ll have to give me time to think about it.”

“Of course. I appreciate your time.”

Denise stood up. “I need to say goodnight to the kids. I’ll be right back.”

As she disappeared, going up the stairs to the second floor, Lucy’s headset crackled to life. “She knows,” Wyatt said.

Lucy got up and hurried over to the small statue of Ganesha sitting on the table shrine in the corner. It had been where Denise’s eyes had darted when Lucy had mentioned secrets.

She picked it up—aha. There was a false bottom.

“You’re paranoid,” she told Wyatt, grabbing the papers out of the statue and stuffing them in her inside jacket pocket, then replacing the statue.

“No, Luce, she knows.”

Lucy returned to her seat at the table. “And how do you know that?”

The front door opened and two generic looking SWAT men walked in, holding Wyatt up by the arms.

Walking alongside them, holding a gun to Wyatt’s head…

“Amy,” Lucy sighed.

Amy smiled at her. She looked as she always did, in jeans and a shirt, a light jacket, her dark blonde hair tumbling around her shoulders, her brown eyes guileless. “Hello Lucy.”

Denise came back down the stairs. “Excellent try, Miss Preston,” she said. “A mediocre audition piece.”

“Audition?” Wyatt said, because Wyatt couldn’t keep quiet if his life depended on it.

“Put the gun away, Lucy,” Amy said softly. She flicked the safety off of her own gun, keeping it pointed at Wyatt’s head.

“I told you she knew it was a dream,” Wyatt grumbled.

“I did,” Denise conceded. “Now, hand over the files please, Miss Preston. Can’t let Rittenhouse get a hold of that information.”

“Go ahead,” Lucy replied. “Kill him. Kill me. We’re in a dream, we’ll just wake up.”

“Fair enough,” Amy conceded. “Get killed, or get a big enough kick, you’ll be jolted out of the dream. But pain…”

She lowered the gun to Wyatt’s leg. “Pain is in the mind.”

Amy fired and Wyatt yelled in pain, his leg buckling.

Lucy grit her teeth. “Amy.”

“Lucy,” Amy repeated, her voice sing song. “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.”

“The papers, Miss Preston,” Denise said.

No way. She needed this job, she needed to get her life back on track, and Rittenhouse was not the kind of group that you could say no to. They didn’t tolerate failure.

She delivered a roundhouse kick, knocking the gun out of Amy’s hand, and drew her own gun in the process, firing and hitting Wyatt point-blank in the forehead. He went down.

 

* * *

 

Wyatt woke up in Agent Christopher’s office.

“Shit.” He stood up and turned to find Emma Whitmore, their architect, staring through the window out onto the street below. “How’s it going?”

“Not good. Mob’s almost here.”

Outside, the city streets were filled with a crazed mob, the citizens rising up, cars burning, windows smashing…

Emma looked back at Wyatt, her arms folded. “Should we wake them up?”

“Not yet. Lucy almost had it.”

 

* * *

 

Lucy ran, the documents safe in her jacket, ran out into the neighborhood, even as the world around her began to crumble and shake. Fuck, Wyatt had been the dreamer for this, now that he was awake on the next level this level wouldn’t hold. Not for long, anyway.

She crouched down in the shadows of the bushes, yanking the papers out and reading them. Most of it was there—ninety percent of it—but one page had blacked-out text on it.

Fuck. Fuck, that wasn’t going to work.

Time for Plan B.

Lucy turned the gun on herself and shot herself out of the dream.

 

* * *

 

When she opened her eyes, it was to Emma and Wyatt’s concerned faces. “We don’t have a lot of time,” Emma warned.

“I know.” Lucy got up. “Wake her up.”

Wyatt shoved Denise out of her office chair, the fall to the floor giving her enough of a kick to jolt her awake.

Lucy pointed her gun at Denise’s head. “You kept something back in your safe. You knew you were dreaming, you knew there was a chance we’d get to it, so you kept some of it back. And we need that information. Now.”

“I have to say,” Denise commented, “I’m disappointed in you, Miss Preston. After your mother—”

Lucy felt her eye twitching. “Don’t. Mention my mother.”

“Kind of a touchy subject with the princess here,” Emma drawled.

“Lucy, wrap it up,” Wyatt said, looking through the window.

“How did you get past my office security?” Denise asked.

“Doesn’t matter.” Lucy cocked the gun. “Tell me what you kept back, or I will blow your brains out.”

She couldn’t fail she couldn’t fail _she couldn’t fail_ …

Denise just laughed. “You know, I really hate this carpet. I keep asking them to put in hardwood floors instead. But I’ve never liked it so much as right now. Because there was a time my kid visited me, and he spilled his coffee right underneath the left table leg onto the carpet. Couldn’t get it out. It was shaped like a giraffe. We used to joke about it.”

Denise indicated—there was no such spot on the carpet.

“I’m still dreaming,” she said, sitting up. “A dream within a dream. Fascinating. You have impressed me, Miss Preston, and here I was ready to give up on you.”

“What is going on?” Wyatt demanded.

Haunting music started to fill the space. Everyone looked around instinctively, trying to find the source of it.

_Help me if you can, I’ve got to get, back to the house at Pooh Corner by one…_

It had been Amy’s favorite lullaby as a child.

Fuck, they were out of time.

Lucy turned the gun on Wyatt and fired, killing him once again.

 

* * *

 

Wyatt woke up on the train, next to an asleep Emma. Across from him sat Denise and Lucy. They’d had to get creative and had ambushed Denise on her train ride back from her international job in Berlin. The agent was supposed to end her trip in Amsterdam and take a flight home from there.

“Thanks,” he said to the woman they’d paid to help wake them up by starting the music at the scheduled time. The music, like shoving Denise or shooting Wyatt, functioned as a kick if you dreamed enough and trained yourself to wake up to it, rather like naturally waking up before your alarm in the morning.

Kate Drummond nodded. She’d been Jess’s close colleague once upon a time. “No problem.”

Wyatt passed her a roll of cash. “Get out of here and stay out of northern Europe for a while.”

Kate saluted—she’d always reminded him of Jess that way—and left the compartment. Probably onto another assignment. Kate was an investigative journalist, just like Jess had been. It was how the two women had met.

Wyatt turned to the other three. Fuck. They were so screwed.

 

* * *

 

“I can do this all day,” Denise said. “After all, I’m dreaming.”

“Yes,” Lucy acknowledged. “But you’re not the one in control. This isn’t your dream.”

Denise frowned, and that was when Emma pulled her own gun.

“It’s mine,” she said.

Emma shot out the glass of the window and hurled herself out, falling down into the arms of the angry, waiting mob below.

 

* * *

 

Emma woke up just as Wyatt was starting to seriously panic.

“You couldn’t get the carpet right!?” he snapped.

“How was I supposed to know about the coffee stain?” Emma replied.

“You’re the architect, you build the dream, it is _literally_ your job.” Wyatt leaned over and lightly slapped Lucy.

Lucy woke up and he started to take out her catheter. They all wore them—it was how the somnacin, the drug compound that induced the lucid dreaming state, got into their system. “And you? Huh? What was that?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Lucy said quickly, clearly not wanting to discuss her little, ah, problem with Emma around. “Let’s get off before she wakes up.”

 

* * *

 

“It went fine,” Lucy said, walking into her hotel room with Wyatt hot on her heels.

“Fine!? Fine!? That’s your definition of fine!?” Wyatt snapped back.

Both of them ignored the otherwise lovely view of the Eiffel Tower that could be seen from the hotel window.

“If that’s fine then I’d sure as hell hate to see not fine. I’d really hate to see it go badly, Luce, wouldn’t you?” Wyatt took off his jacket and tie and threw them onto the bed.

Flynn and Lucy had picked out all his suits for him, once upon a time. They’d had such fun with it… Wyatt could remember them laughing together, picking out ties for him, teasing him when he’d pouted, told him to be good…

Their clients always commented on what a sharp dresser he was. If only they knew.

Lucy ran a hand through her hair. “Amy—”

“Amy turned up, sabotaged our job, _shot_ me—”

“I’ll have her under control next time!”

“Sure you will.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Wyatt grabbed the PASIV, the device that controlled the somnacin and allowed the person to enter the shared dreaming state. “It means that a high-ranking member of Homeland Security now knows our faces and our identities and we are not safe here. We need to go to Japan or Nepal or Cape Town or goddamn Australia. Not Europe, that’s for damn sure.”

He turned away, carrying the PASIV out with him. He sure as fuck wasn’t trusting Lucy with it. She’d just plug herself in and dream with Amy again. “I’ll book us tickets.”

“Rittenhouse can find us anywhere,” Lucy warned.

“And you’re _okay_ with that?”

“I’ll handle it. I know them, I know how they work.”

“Back in your mom’s day maybe when Keynes was in charge but not now with Temple running things.”

“I’ll figure it out,” Lucy said stubbornly.

Wyatt didn’t say anything more—what was there to say?

He just left, and went into his hotel room next door.

Once, Flynn would be in the room with him. They always got separate beds, but really, who were they fooling. Wyatt had always known that Flynn was head over heels for Lucy. Wyatt had been—still was—head over heels for her too, but he’d long since come to terms with the fact that Lucy wanted him, but she didn’t _need_ him.

She needed Flynn. And without him… where were the two of them?

Adrift.

Wyatt laid down on the single bed and plugged himself in, slipping under.

He found himself sitting on a hill, under a tree. It was just outside his hometown in Texas.

It was where he always met her.

Jess was climbing the tree—he could hear the rustle of the branches. A moment later she dropped down in front of him. “She’s getting worse.”

“I know.”

Jess sat down next to him, laying her head on his shoulder. She always looked a bit younger in dreams than she’d been when she’d died. As an investigative reporter she’d always been putting herself in dangerous situations, and Wyatt had sometimes been convinced an assignment would get her killed. It had fueled a lot of their arguments.

Well, that and Wyatt’s own possessive and jealous behavior.

But it hadn’t been an assignment that had killed her. Wyatt had.

They’d been arguing on their way home from the Pelican Lounge in San Diego when Jess had gotten out of the car. One of her old boyfriends had been at the bar and she’d been catching up with him and Wyatt had… not taken it well. They’d been high school sweethearts but they’d also been off and on after that, until the trip back to their hometown for Thanksgiving with Jess’s parents where Wyatt had finally proposed. In the ‘off’ portions, Jess had found other men and apparently, once, had a fling with Kate.

Wyatt hadn’t learned that fun fact until the funeral, when he and Kate had gotten ridiculously drunk and mourned together.

In any case, Wyatt had reacted badly to the old boyfriend, Jess had been done with his bullshit, and she’d gotten out of the car. It had taken him only about twenty minutes driving to calm down and turn around to get her, but when he’d gotten there, she was gone.

He never found her again.

A couple joggers found her, though, after a couple of weeks of Wyatt’s frantic searching with the San Diego Police.

Wyatt had signed up for Project Morpheus the next day.

Jess, as always, knew his thoughts. “You hated Flynn for that,” she said.

“I never hated him,” Wyatt countered. “I just thought I did.”

One of the assignments in Project Morpheus had been trying to extract secrets from each other. Flynn had been assigned to Wyatt, and he’d extracted the truth of Jess’s death from him.

Wyatt had slugged him in real life for that.

Jess hummed noncommittally. “What do you want to do about Lucy?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I’m you, honey. You know that, right?”

“Of course I know that. You’re my subconscious. But I don’t know, maybe because of that you’ve thought of something the rest of me hasn’t.”

“If I had, I’d tell you.”

Wyatt took her hand, squeezing tightly. Jess was a shade, but she wasn’t violent. She had been, at first, but as Wyatt had come to accept his part in her death and had gone to therapy (Flynn’s idea) and move past the toxic behavior and thoughts that had ruined their relationship, the Jess in his mind had become more like her real self.

Now, he went under just to talk with her. He knew it was hypocritical of him, given Lucy and Amy, but hey, his shade wasn’t literally sabotaging missions and shooting them.

“You could reach out to him,” Jess said softly.

“He’d never respond. You know how nasty I got when he left.”

“You would get nasty with me and I forgave you.”

“Yeah but you’re a saint and we were a little codependent.”

Jess gave a soft laugh. “Fair enough.” She paused. “You proposed to me here.”

“Yeah, I remember. Opened the ring box upside down like an idiot.”

“But I kissed you and said yes, and then we looked for the ring together.” Jess kissed his shoulder. “Sometimes you’re going to open the ring box upside down, Wyatt.”

“I told him to go to Hell if he was so keen on running away.”

“So tell him you’re sorry and ask him to come back. Have you been happy since he left? Has Lucy been happy?”

“But he should have stayed.”

“None of you ever said you loved each other. Making out in dark corners doesn’t equal telling the man you want to be with him and sleeping with a woman in a dream construct of Hedy Lamarr’s house doesn’t equal telling her that you love her.”

“Would it have even made a difference? If we’d said, hey, I love you and I want to be with you?”

“Maybe not. But maybe it would have. You don’t know. And you don’t know now unless you reach out to him.”

“I can’t.”

Jess sighed. “Then that’s your choice, honey.”

“You’re disappointed in me.”

“I was never disappointed in you. Just sad.”

“Okay but are you saying that because it’s true or because you’re me and that’s what I wish Jess felt?”

Jess shrugged. “You’ll never know, will you?”

They paused for a few minutes, just watching the sunset. Jess was warm against his side, painfully lifelike after so many years of carefully reconstructing her in his mind. But he still wondered just how much of her was accurate to life, and how much of her was warped by his memory and perceptions of her.

“When will you let me go?” Jess asked, her voice soft and aching.

Wyatt swallowed. “Soon.” He knew he had to, but… Flynn was gone, and he didn’t know how to reach Lucy anymore. She might be a self-indulgent memory, but Jess was all he had left.

They sat there and watched until the sun went down and all was dark.

 

* * *

 

Lucy tried to ignore the twist in her stomach as they entered Paris-Charles de Gaulle. Wyatt had booked them tickets to Tokyo by way of Africa, Australia, and the Middle East. It was the job of the point man not to just gather information and serve as the sort of stage manager for it all, but also to make sure that nobody—not the mark, not upset clients, not the authorities—got a hold of their trail once they split after the job.

“Emma’s not answering,” Wyatt said quietly as they got their tickets at the counter.

“She’s fine,” Lucy replied. “She’s smart.”

“She got the goddamn carpet wrong.”

“Wyatt, please.”

They went through security without much trouble, although there was always that fun moment of wondering if one of the officers on duty would ask to take a closer look at the PASIV. She and Wyatt traveled light, doing carry on, not willing to let their things out of their sight and needing it all on hand if they had to switch planes or ditch at the last second.

Once they got to their gate, though, Lucy stopped short.

Denise Christopher was waiting for them.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck—

“Miss Preston. Sergeant Major.” Denise looked at the both of them. “I’m sure you can spare me a moment.”

“We—”

“Emma Whitmore works for Rittenhouse,” Denise said.

The bottom dropped out of Lucy’s stomach. “What?”

Beside her, she could feel Wyatt tensing, mentally berating himself. It was his job to find out things like that. But Wyatt was good at what he did. If Emma had kept that information on lockdown then almost nobody could find it.

“How do you know?” Lucy asked, struggling to keep her voice steady.

“Because she’s making the connection public,” Denise said. “And my sources tell me she plans to set a trap for you two.”

“And you’re here to tell us jail is a better deal than Rittenhouse Enterprises,” Wyatt asked sardonically.

“No, I’m here to offer you the chance to take down Rittenhouse in exchange for helping me.”

“Helping you with what?”

“I’ve heard about you. Your reputation. And I knew that you two would come after me eventually, that Rittenhouse would make use of you against me somehow. I’ve been after them for years, I’m their Public Enemy No. 1. And so I decided that when you came for me, I’d treat it as an audition, see how good you two really are. I had no idea until Emma’s mistake with the carpet that I was still dreaming. I didn’t know that a dream within a dream was possible. It was nicely done, a good backup plan when the first went sour.

“You two clearly know how to take an idea or information from someone. Extraction, I believe you call it. I want you to do the opposite for me. I want you to plant an idea. I think the term was dubbed ‘inception’? I want you to do that. Give someone an idea.”

“It doesn’t work,” Wyatt snapped. “Look, okay, I tell you, don’t think about elephants, what are you thinking about?”

“Elephants.”

“Exactly. But you know I gave you that idea. Same with an abstract concept. I tell you, don’t think about love, what are you thinking about?”

“Love.”

“Right. And you know I put that idea there—and since it’s abstract, I don’t even know that you’re thinking about the kind of love I want you to think about. Maybe I wanted you to think about your wife but you’re thinking about your kids.” Wyatt leaned forward. “The subconscious can always trace the genesis of the idea. True genesis is impossible to fake.”

“That’s not true,” Lucy whispered.

Wyatt glanced at her, his eyebrows raising. “What?”

“You can do it?” Denise asked.

“Do I have a choice in this?” Lucy countered.

“Can you walk away?” Denise replied.

“You’re damn right.”

“Then you have a choice.” Denise shrugged. “Good luck with Rittenhouse.”

Wyatt frowned. “Is that a threat?”

“I can handle Rittenhouse,” Lucy replied. “My mom worked with them, I know how they operate.”

“It’s your choice,” Denise repeated. She gestured at the plane as the final boarding call started.

“Lucy, we need to go.” Wyatt hefted his bag up and tugged on her elbow. “Lucy.”

“Don’t you want to go home, Miss Preston?” Denise asked. “Don’t you want to go back to Stanford? To your house, to the life you left behind?”

Lucy swallowed. Of course she wanted to go back home. It was all she had left now. Amy was gone. Mom was gone. Flynn was gone. She and Wyatt had nothing but the broken shell of their former relationship.

“Lucy.” Wyatt’s voice was full of warning. “Don’t do it.”

“Can you guarantee,” she said. “Can you _promise_ me, that you can do that?”

Denise Christopher was high up in Homeland. She had a fuck ton of contacts. If anyone could pull some strings with law enforcement…

“We don’t even know what the job is!” Wyatt hissed. “And we’re going to miss our flight!”

“It’s very simple,” Denise said. “Rittenhouse is trying to fund some… dangerous experimental research. I want you to convince the man who would run that research that he should break up his business empire and not take the Rittenhouse deal. After how Rittenhouse tried to get a hold of the dream technology, I’m sure you can sympathize with my concerns. My team are very close to netting Rittenhouse but we can’t do it if they partner with this individual. His money and his technology would give them power that I simply can’t match. I’m not sure that any government with its bureaucracy and split agendas can.”

“How do I know that I can trust you?” Lucy asked, desperation throbbing in her veins, in her head like a migraine.

“You don’t,” Denise replied. “But I’m your best shot. Take a leap of faith.”

Lucy couldn’t quite smother her wince. She’d once promised Flynn he could put his faith in her.

Look how that had turned out.

Wyatt looked betrayed, knowing her thoughts even before she spoke them.

“All right,” Lucy said.

Denise nodded. “Assemble your team. I’ll be in touch with you.”

She turned and left.

Lucy didn’t get on the plane.

 

* * *

 

Jiya was on her way to her architecture class when her professor stopped her. “Marri, do you have a moment?”

Jiya shrugged. “Sure thing, Anthony.”

Professor Bruhl was one of her favorites. She didn’t recognize the lovely brunette standing next to him, the woman made up of all sharp angles and lines—if Jiya was drawing her, she’d use charcoal, go for Cubism.

“Ah, wonderful.” Anthony indicated the woman. “This is the student I was telling you about, Jiya Marri. She’s a graduate of Cal Tech and one of our best and brightest. Marri, this is Lucy Preston.”

That name stirred something in Jiya's memory as she shook Lucy’s hand. “Have I read one of your articles?”

“I was in history, so probably not,” Lucy replied, her face softening for a moment into an almost smile. “You might be thinking of my mother, Carol Preston.”

Of course. Dr. Carol Preston, a pioneer in architecture, the latest in a long line of academics on both sides of her family. A genius, everyone said, held degrees in fine arts, chemistry, psychology, neurology, and history. A true Renaissance woman.

“I’m sorry about your loss,” Jiya blurted out.

Lucy blinked, then gave a smile that was not nearly so soft. “Ah. Yes. It was a long time coming. It was all the smoking she did. Picked up the habit from my father.”

Dr. Preston had died of cancer last year, after a long, hard battle.

“I attended a lecture by her years ago, as a high school student.” Jiya clutched her notebooks tighter, feeling like she was making a misstep but not sure how. “She’s who inspired me to go into architecture and engineering.”

“Anthony’s shown me your work,” Lucy said. “It’s impressive. Your use of mirrors in your latest 3D model is ingenious.”

Jiya felt her face heating up. “Thank you.”

“Perhaps we could walk and talk?”

Jiya nodded. “Um, yes, but—what is this about?”

Lucy tilted her head to the side, almost like a cat. “I have a special project and I need to bring on an intern, a fresh face, to help me.”

“An architecture project? I thought you said you were history.”

“I was, once. Mother was never pleased that I wasn’t the cross-departmental Mozart that she was.” Lucy paused. “I suppose I lacked her daring. My sister got all of that. I got the studiousness.”

“Your mother was proud of you,” Anthony said quietly, as though this was a long-standing conversation between the two of them.

“Was she?” Lucy replied, and Jiya would have seen the bitterness in Lucy’s face even if she’d been blind. “In any case. I know quite a lot about my mother’s work even if I only hold one degree instead of ten. Shall we?”

She indicated for Jiya to walk with her, and Jiya fell into step beside her, feeling like she was looking at the human version of an Escher drawing: an impossibility, an enigma somehow come to life.

 

* * *

 

The café was nice, the day even more so, the sun shining but not blazing hot, the people around them chattering in French that Jiya still sometimes struggled to keep up with. Lucy Preston sat across from her, looking as enigmatic as ever. Perfectly put together.

Jiya felt almost certain all that sophistication was a mask.

“They say that we use only a fraction of our brain’s true potential while we’re awake,” Lucy said, as if she was observing the weather was nice today. “But when we dream, that’s a different story.”

Jiya tilted her head. “I know that line. Your mother opened a speech with it, at Harvard.”

Lucy nodded. She looked pleased and pained at the same moment. “You’ve done your research.”

“I’m good at what I do.”

“I don’t want good, I want the best.” Lucy looked at her. “Are you the best?”

Jiya was a woman of color and with an inferiority complex to boot. She had long since resigned herself to the idea that she was never going to be the best—or that if she was, she must somehow be wrong, that she had to doubt every achievement, that there must be a hidden catch to her supposed accomplishments. She’d always had the impression that if she stood up and said she was good at something, she would then immediately be proven false, and shown to be a failure.

But she also believed in truth. Facts. Accuracy. Facts didn’t lie, they didn’t change based on opinion or perception or how you were feeling that day, if you were hungry or drunk or tired. It was what made her such a good architect and engineer, that attention to detail and that insistence on accuracy.

So, what was the truth for her?

“I am,” Jiya said. “Top of my class.”

Lucy looked openly pleased at this. “I’m glad to hear it. I like a woman who knows her worth. Now, here’s what I need from you. You know about my mother’s theories about lucid dreaming.”

“Yes. I mean, it was a pity it was impossible—”

“It wasn’t impossible.”

Jiya stared at her. “It… it wasn’t?”

Lucy shook her head. “My mother needed a lot of funding. The U.S. and Russian militaries were happy to join forces for once, each determined to undermine the intelligence of the other, and created a joint team and funded her research. She got additional research from a group known as Rittenhouse, who helped her get to the beta testing phase she needed to be at to impress the military enough to convince the two countries to fund her.

“They selected a team of soldiers, one Russian and one American, both top operatives. Delta mainly for America. I don’t know the exact process they used for the Russian team selection. They plugged them in and pushed them to their limits. My mother was the architect, she created the dreamworlds for them, and the soldiers would run assignments, undergo new torture methods—pain is only in the mind, after all—test run operations, and test the limits of what this technology could do.”

“It sounds…” Jiya didn’t want to speak badly of a brilliant woman, or of Lucy’s mother, but…

“You can say it sounds inhumane,” Lucy said quietly. “That’s exactly what it was. After a while you couldn’t tell what was real and what was a dream. Several soldiers killed themselves, convinced they had to wake up.”

“You sound like you were there.”

“I was.” Lucy’s eyes got dark. “I watched the best friend of the man I loved shoot himself before any of us could do anything. A good man, a kind man, the most cheerful man in our group. Dave, was his name. I watched that same man I loved nearly do himself in until our other squadmate—he read it in his eyes, wrestled him to the ground and convinced him this was real, that he wasn’t dreaming.”

“How? How did he convince him?”

“We’ll get to that.” Lucy cleared her throat. “The point is, it exists. It’s real. And it’s been a very criminal, very lucrative way to make money—mostly by espionage and corporate sabotage—for the past few years.

“You see, when we dream, our creative process—it’s untethered. Perception and creation happen simultaneously. There’s no gap, no pause in the process. And you do it so naturally in your dreams, you don’t even realize that it’s happening. And with the PASIV technology—that’s what we call it—you can get right into the middle of that process, and urge the dreamer to create what you want them to. To lead you right to the place in their mind where they hide all their secrets.”

“Okay…” Jiya still wasn’t sure this wasn’t all cock and bull, but it sounded real enough. And the pain in Lucy’s eyes when she’d talked about the soldier who’d killed himself, and the man she’d nearly lost, that couldn’t be faked. “Isn’t that problematic, though? Rooting around in someone’s mind? And I don’t mean morally, I mean psychologically.”

“Oh, very,” Lucy replied, without even a hint of sugar to help the medicine go down. “You can lose track of reality, forget what’s your mind and what is someone else’s mind, you can push yourself too far in one way or another and your mind will snap and you’ll be completely lost to insanity… there are plenty of ways to lose your mind in this kind of thing.”

“Why would anyone do this?” Jiya asked. “If it’s so dangerous, if you can go insane…”

Lucy smiled at her. “Because of what you can do in dreams, you can’t do anywhere else. You can build cities, empires, live out your dream life, relive memories, be with loved ones you lost or never had.

“What you do, as the architect, is you build that world for us. Then we bring the mark under, and they naturally fill that world with their subconscious, including their secrets. Then we simply go in and steal those secrets. Sometimes we have to interact with the mark a little, con them, but it’s all controlled. In dreams we can control every aspect the way we never can in real life.”

“But how could I ever recreate anything in enough detail to trick someone into thinking they were awake, never mind trust the reality around them enough to just instinctively fill it with their secrets?” Jiya asked.

“Dreams feel real while you’re in them, right?” Lucy pointed out. She took a sip of her coffee, winced, then added two sugars and a touch of milk to it. “Your heart pounds with fear when the zombies chase you, your body throbs with arousal when the hot actor is fucking you, you feel weightless as you fly. It’s only when you wake up that you realize how fake it all was.”

Jiya supposed that made sense. “But won’t the mark remember falling asleep?”

Lucy raised an eyebrow. “Do you ever remember the beginning of dreams? Or do you just find yourself in the middle of one all of a sudden?”

“Okay, fair enough.”

“So how did we end up here?”

Jiya paused. “We… we just came from…”

Not from school, no, not… where… how…

Lucy’s smirk grew.

The world around them started to shake. Lucy laid a hand on Jiya’s arm. “Stay calm. It’s all right. My partner Wyatt is watching over us, you’re perfectly safe. This is your first lesson in shared dreaming. I just need you to breathe slowly for me.”

She couldn’t breathe slow, she couldn’t calm down, the world was shaking even harder and the buildings were collapsing—

“Jiya, it’s okay—”

Jiya’s eyes rolled back into her head and her body jerked as she tried to take control—

She opened her eyes.

She was in a warehouse of some kind. A man with dark blue eyes, scruff, and messy dark blond hair was observing them, looking skeptical. He was wearing a suit comprised of varying but harmonious shades of gray.

That must be the Wyatt that Lucy mentioned.

Lucy herself was sitting up in a lawn chair. Jiya realized that she was sitting in a lawn chair as well.

Jiya stumbled to her feet, her stomach lurching, nausea taking over. “You—I—you lied, I had—no idea—”

“Told you,” Wyatt muttered.

There was a catheter in her arm, what the fuck? She was hooked up to some kind of machine that fit inside of a silver briefcase. The pas—pass—PASIV, that was what Lucy had called it, right?

Jiya carefully took the catheter out of her arm, wincing. “You are insane,” she snapped. “Absolutely, one hundred percent, batshit crazy.”

Her mind was already abnormal enough, she didn’t need compounds—drugs—oh God, what if—

“Don’t worry,” Lucy said, as if she’d guessed. “We adjusted the somnacin compounds to account for the neurodivergence in your brain.”

Jiya glared at her. “So you found that out too, huh? Just went rooting through all my files? Or did you get it from my subconscious like a mark?”

She grabbed her sweater. She didn’t remember taking it off, she didn’t even remember coming to this warehouse. “You’re both psychos,” she snapped, and then she stormed out.

 

* * *

 

“She’ll be back,” Lucy said as Jiya left.

Wyatt wasn’t so sure. Lucy was good at reading people, once upon a time, but that had been before… everything. Now Lucy couldn’t even see herself clearly. How could she read anyone else?

Lucy got up and grabbed her jacket. “Reality won’t be enough for her anymore. I could see the look in her eyes. She’ll come back, and I’ll need you to be here when she does.”

Wyatt folded his arms, frowning. “And why do I need to be here?” For one thing, why here specifically, in a goddamn warehouse as opposed to a nice bed in a hotel.

He might’ve roughed it in the army but he wasn’t in goddamn Delta anymore, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to rough it if he could help it.

“Because I’m going to get Flynn.”

That brought Wyatt up short, his stomach churning in a way it hadn’t since… well, since the last time he’d seen Flynn. It was heat and ice at the same time, feeling like he didn’t know which way was up. “Flynn? He’s in Mombasa.”

Lucy arched an eyebrow at him and Wyatt felt his face heating up. He looked away. So what if he knew where Flynn was? He was the point man, dammit, he knew where everyone in the dreamshare community was.

“He’s the best,” Lucy said, instead of whatever she probably actually wanted to say. “And we need the best.”

“There are plenty of thieves.”

“We don’t need a thief. We need a forger.”

Wyatt could concede that seeing as Flynn had literally invented forging, he was arguably the person to go to, but still. “And he’s not going to come work with us.”

“Once I tell him what the job is, he will.”

“Lucy.” Wyatt stopped himself. _You broke his goddamn heart_ , he wanted to say. _Flynn hates me_ , he wanted to say. _When he said he wasn’t coming back, he meant it. Flynn never cared about the goddamn jobs._

But Lucy wasn’t going to listen to him anyway, and they’d argued about Flynn plenty in the weeks since he’d up and abandoned them. What was the point of rehashing it all now when Lucy wouldn’t even change her mind?

“I’ll be back in a couple of days,” Lucy said, as if Wyatt hadn’t spoken. She put her jacket on.

Wyatt swallowed. “Have a safe flight.” _Tell me how he is, tell me he’s okay, tell me he’s happy, tell me he’s miserable without us._

Lucy paused, then walked up to him and lightly kissed his cheek. “You stay safe, too.”

It was like seeing her old self, if only for a moment, and Wyatt’s heart broke all over again.

Then she was gone in a whiff of strawberry shampoo.

 

* * *

 

Flynn hadn’t heard from Lucy in a year.

He hadn’t heard from Wyatt either but seeing as the last time they’d spoken Wyatt had told him he’d see him in Hell and Flynn said to tell them who’d sent him, he wasn’t exactly holding his breath.

Lucy, though. Lucy he’d… well. Foolish of him, but he had hope. Once.

He’d been so damn certain that he could snap her out of it. That losing him, the person who had promised her they’d make a great team one day, the person who’d helped her steal the goddamn dreamshare technology out of the military (you’re welcome, criminal underworld), the person who had promised to stay by her side no matter what—that his departure would mean something to her. That it would be the sign that she needed that she was spiraling, going too deep, making the same mistake that Amy had.

Looked like he had just played himself for a fool. Again.

But then he got the text—how Lucy had gotten his number he didn’t know, but actually it was probably Wyatt’s work that had dug it up—asking him to meet for a coffee in one of the places he regularly got a cup.

Yeah. Definitely Wyatt’s research.

He contacted Rufus immediately, because he wasn’t an idiot despite all evidence to the contrary (Wyatt had never shut up about the time Flynn had blown up the Hindenburg in a dream during a military exercise) and let Rufus know where he’d be and when in case it went south. Flynn didn’t quite think that Lucy would go to all this trouble just to shoot him, but he’d heard whispers about the sort of people Lucy had been getting herself mixed up with.

Those who underestimated Rittenhouse ended up dead.

When he got to the café—he was first, of course he was—he found a spot by the balcony. Easy escape routes. The coffee tasted more bitter than usual, and Flynn was fully aware it wasn’t because of anything actually in the drink.

_Thank you for the coffee. And the… yeah._

“Flynn.”

Lucy sat down in front of him, her voice carefully neutral, her face hesitant, guarded.

“Lucy.” It had been a year since he’d said her name out loud. “You look no less… you look good.”

She was wearing a powder blue suit, looking like the kind of carefully done up that said the outfit was as much shield as sword. “You’ve looked better.”

“As bad as São Paulo?” he countered.

Flynn had agreed to the undoubtedly-suicidal mission of infiltrating the joint U.S.-Russian military operation on dreamsharing technology because his wife and child had just died in a car fire and, well, he hadn’t seen much point to sticking around after that. They were plunging themselves into uncontrolled untethered dreams, and the higher ups hadn’t cared all that much about the psychological wellbeing of the soldiers who were being pushed beyond their limits again and again in their own minds. The military had seen an opportunity to torture a man for eternity in his mind without actually hurting him physically. They had seen a way to run combat simulations more realistic than VR. They had seen weapons and tools.

And since they’d only somewhat known what kind of grenade they were playing with, shit had gotten bad a few times.

Wyatt had gotten Jess, his shade. Flynn didn’t know if Lucy knew about her, but Flynn sure as fuck had found out after he’d been in Wyatt’s dream and Jess had tried to fuck him and stab him at the same time. “He wants you so bad,” she’d said. “He wants you so bad and he hates himself and you for it.”

And Flynn… Flynn had gotten São Paulo.

He’d been deep, not so deep as Limbo but close. When they’d tried to pull him out, they couldn’t. Carol had wanted to leave him for braindead but Lucy had insisted she could reach him.

And she had. She’d strode into the bar, convinced him this was a dream by showing him her journal. “I can’t read it,” he’d told her.

“You can’t read things in dreams,” Lucy had told him. It was one of the quirks of dreamsharing they had yet to figure out. “This is us doing the moon landing three months ago in Baumgardner’s dream. This is…”

She’d talked him out of it. Gotten him to wake up.

He’d loved her before that but oh, he’d realized just how bad it was then.

Today’s Lucy was nothing like that woman. Or she was, but just buried, hidden underneath layers and carefully constructed walls. She gave him the impression of a crumbling tower, trying so hard to remain upright but seconds from falling to dust.

“No, not as bad as that,” Lucy replied.

Flynn pushed the spare coffee he’d ordered towards her. “Two sugars, touch of milk?”

Lucy accepted it. “You have a good memory.” She paused. “I don’t know how to approach this subtly. We’ve been hired to perform an inception.”

Flynn almost choked on his coffee but covered it up with an easy smirk. “Oh, have you now?”

“Yes. And before you tell me it’s impossible—”

“It’s not impossible, it’s just difficult.”

“Wyatt says it’s not possible.”

“Wyatt? You’re still working with that old stick in the mud?”

“He’s good at what he does,” Lucy said, or at least her words did. Her tone suggested that she was actually saying something along the lines of _not sure you should be making comments about Wyatt and sticks, stud, given where you wanted to put yours on his person._

“Oh of course he is. He’s the best.” Wyatt was a good soldier, a dutiful one, the kind of guy who loved following orders and checking off to-do lists so long as he got to be snarky while he was at it. The definition of a bratty sub. “But he’s got no imagination.”

“And you’re all imagination.” Lucy sipped at her coffee and Flynn hated how his heart warmed at the small, satisfied crinkling at the corners of her eyes.

“If you’re going to perform inception, you need someone with imagination.”

“Have you done it before?” Lucy asked. “I couldn’t find record of it in Project Morpheus and I don’t remember you doing it with me—”

“I’ve tried. Got the idea in place, but it didn’t take.”

Lucy shrugged. “You just didn’t plant it deep enough.”

“It’s not about depth,” Flynn countered. “You need the simplest version of the idea. You’re looking for it to grow naturally in the subject’s mind. It’s a very subtle art.”

Lucy rolled her eyes, but she had that fond look about her as she did it, the way she always had, that _oh Flynn_ air she’d get when he was being sassy with their superiors.

God, he was still so in love with her. Always had been, although he’d been too much of a coward to say it. Wyatt, at least, he’d done stuff with physically, together in deed if not in words, the two of them crashing together like planets with a destructive orbit. But Lucy…

He’d almost told her, once, after the news about Carol’s cancer diagnosis. They’d been outside of her hotel room door and he’d been seconds away—but they’d been interrupted and he hadn’t ever been backed into a corner by her like that again, forced to admit how he felt, and besides, Lucy’d had other things to worry about then. Carol. Then Amy.

Maybe it was better, given all that happened after, that he had never said it that night.

“So, what idea are you looking to plant?” he asked.

“We need the head of a billion-dollar tech corporation to dissolve his empire before Rittenhouse can get a foothold in it and take control,” Lucy replied.

“See, right there, that’s a wealth of possible motivations but you have to strip them all away. Get it down to the essentials. Usually an emotional one. Anyone your mark is close to?”

“There was a protégé he split with a few years ago. They were like father and son.”

“Excellent. Do you have a chemist?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ve got a man. Rufus, he’s the best.” Rufus Carlin was Flynn’s only real friend out here. Not that he or Rufus would ever admit they saw each other that way. Perish the thought.

“Can you take me to see him?”

Flynn nodded. “Soon as we take care of the pesky Rittenhouse bastard on your tail.”

Lucy started a little, the coffee cup jolting in her hand. Flynn gently took it from her, setting it down, ignoring the way Lucy’s cheeks got pink as their fingers brushed. Maybe Lucy had loved him once, or had at least been physically attracted to him, he didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. Amy was Lucy’s world. He and Wyatt were expendable.

“Tell me, we’re on a balcony, think you can make it if you jump down into those baskets below us?” he asked.

Lucy glanced down. “Yes.”

She had started out a civilian, an academic, but after working with the military and then working on the shady side of the law, and then being out and out on the run… she’d toughened up. Flynn had been the one to teach her how to fight.

He didn’t dream naturally anymore, which was a mercy. His dreams had always been nightmares after Lorena and Iris died. But he only entered the lucid dreaming for jobs, or to practice a forge. He never did it for fun.

But if he had—he knew it would all be memories of Lucy.

Flynn nodded. “I’ll take care of the tail. Meet me back here in half an hour.”

“You don’t have to protect me,” Lucy said.

Flynn stood up. “I know.”

He turned and said loudly, “Karl! Karl, isn’t it? It’s been years!”

Behind him, Lucy jumped.

 

* * *

 

There was more than one Rittenhouse agent after her—of course there was—but Lucy was smaller and more agile, and she just managed to lose him before doubling back to the café.

Flynn was waiting, leaning against a wall, looking dashing and annoyingly handsome. The man had always been too attractive for his own good, or for hers, or for anyone else’s. Ever since she’d first clapped eyes on him at Project Morpheus she’d known he was bad news, although not for the reasons she later learned. Flynn did the brooding, bad-for-your-health look remarkably well but underneath he was soft, devastatingly so—and that was why he was bad news for her.

She knew that she was the one to blame. It wasn’t anything Flynn had done wrong. She’d been the one to never—she’d been the one who’d made it impossible for him to keep loving her.

Unlike Wyatt, she didn’t blame Flynn for leaving.

“Where’s this chemist?” she asked, falling into step beside him. Flynn generously slowed down his pace—there was a foot of height difference between them—to escort her through the busy streets.

Lucy didn’t ask what he’d done to the Rittenhouse agents. She knew, and Flynn knew that she knew.

It was easy to make people disappear in a big, crowded city like Mombasa.

The chemist’s shop looked like a family-run spice and herbal store, selling things for cooking as well as basic herbal remedies. The desk at the back where your total was run up was slathered with stickers, some geeky like _I brake for Imperial Starships_ and others a middle finger to white people like _I feed my cat an all-vegan diet, only the finest vegans I can find_.

Sure enough, a sleek gray cat was crawling about on the shelves.

“What’s his name?” Lucy asked.

“Picard,” Rufus said. He was a tall, well-built black man with an American accent—not what Lucy had expected. She would’ve thought Rufus was a local, or from somewhere else in Africa, but apparently he’d grown up in America and had graduated from MIT. “I know, I know, I’m a _Star Wars_ guy mainly but I don’t know, it just fit him.”

“I’ll need you to come out into the field,” she said. “This is a delicate operation and I can’t just buy from you here.”

Rufus shook his head. “I don’t do fieldwork.”

“I’m building a dream that needs three levels,” Lucy countered.

That got Rufus’s attention. “Why three?”

“We’re performing an inception, not an extraction.”

“You can’t do that—the dream would be too unstable.”

“Not if you add a sedative.”

Rufus glanced at Flynn. “I take it you told her.”

“About your dream dens? No, no, not until this second.”

Rufus flipped Flynn off.

“How long do they dream?” she asked. She didn’t need to see the den—she’d heard about them. She couldn’t blame anyone for dreaming their life away. She knew full well the seductive power of dreams. But that didn’t mean she had to see it.

“Three, four hours at a time, forty hours in the dreaming world,” Rufus told her. “And what exactly are you planning to do? Who’s the target?”

Lucy glanced at Flynn. Normally she wouldn’t tell a man she’d just met about her mark, no matter how good of a chemist he was, but… Flynn trusted Rufus. And she trusted Flynn.

“Mason,” she said. “Connor Mason, of Mason Industries.”

Rufus’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s go big or go home with you, huh?”

“I target who my clients ask me to target.”

Rufus sighed. “Okay, I admit it, I’m curious. Fine. I’ll come with you.”

Flynn grinned, clapping Rufus on the shoulder. “I told you that you’d want to be in on this.”

“Just don’t make me regret it,” Rufus grumbled.

 

* * *

 

Jiya hated herself for it, but…

She wanted to go back.

In those moments before she’d woken up, she’d seen what dreaming could be. The way the world had collapsed and exploded and turned in on itself. As her eyes had rolled back into her head she’d seen colors she’d never even known existed, spinning out and around and oh, the worlds she’d seen she could build, the _worlds_ …

She wanted to build them. She wanted to construct empires.

Lucy’s smile as Jiya walked back into the warehouse was triumphant and knowing, but Jiya ignored that. “All right,” she said, as Wyatt gaped disbelievingly at her from behind Lucy’s shoulder. “Teach me how to dream.”

 

* * *

 

Denise was, how should she put it… not terribly impressed with Garcia Flynn to start out with.

Not that she doubted his ability to do his job well. Flynn had invented the art of forging—the ability to become someone else in a dream, to change one’s appearance and masquerade to the mark as someone they trusted, a close friend or family member, even a lover. Everything about Flynn screamed calculated ease, and Denise suspected mightily that underneath that façade was a very lonely man who felt very awkward with himself.

It was more that she wasn’t impressed with his attitude.

Rufus Carlin, the chemist, he was all right. Cheerful, a sense of humor, didn’t take himself or anything else too seriously, and he got on well with all the others. Jiya Marri had plenty of potential. Wyatt Logan would do whatever Lucy told him to, so that was all well and good.

That just left Lucy as the wild card. Could her mind remain stable enough?

Denise certainly hoped so.

“So tell me, Flynn,” Denise asked. “What was your role, when you were working with Lucy and Wyatt? You didn’t meet with clients like they did or they would’ve found someone to replace you when you left. You weren’t the chemist, or Rufus wouldn’t be here.”

“Lucy and Wyatt did actually train people to defend their minds from attack,” Flynn told her. “They might have gotten desperate recently but that was their expertise. Lucy didn’t want people vulnerable to attacks from whatever politician had the biggest bribe to the right chemist.”

“According to my records, they serviced several politicians as well. Shady ones. And some not-so-savory businessmen.”

“That’s just the thing,” Flynn said with a smirk. “They would train you to prevent you from being extracted on by almost anyone, sure. But they could also leave a particularly shaped hole in your subconscious. A back door that only one person could slip through.”

Denise thought she got it now.

Of course. Only one person—the person Lucy and Wyatt loved—could slip past their militarization, be trusted no matter what. And Lucy and Wyatt trained the subconscious of their clients. Whoever Lucy and Wyatt trusted, therefore, the client’s militarization would trust.

“In like Flynn,” Rufus joked.

“What are you doing here, Agent Christopher?” Flynn asked. “Hmm? Protecting your investment?”

“I’m coming with you,” Denise replied.

Flynn snorted derisively. “This is no place for tourists.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be a part of Mason’s staff right now?” Denise countered. “Getting a post as his secretary or something, finding out all you can about this supposed protégé so you can forge him?”

Flynn’s job in the dream would be to look like the protégé, and use that emotional bond to manipulate Mason into giving up his company, splitting it and dividing the assets and abandoning the time travel tech.

Information on this elusive protégé, however, was proving difficult. Whoever he or she or they had been, when they’d split from Mason, Mason had covered up all evidence of their existence. Out of anger or to protect them, Denise didn’t know. It would be Flynn’s job to find out.

And to find out soon. Time—ironically—was running out.

They were going to catch Mason on his flight from his headquarters in London to San Francisco, where he was supposed to meet with Rittenhouse executives to sign the deal and make their partnership official. It was a thirteen hour flight, plenty of time to catch him asleep and perform the inception.

If they were ready.

And as Denise watched Jiya frantically training, and Lucy struggling to keep a hold of herself, and Wyatt and Flynn circling each other like wolves… she was starting to feel like they’d never make it.

 

* * *

 

Flynn was having way too much fun settling up the whiteboard with pictures and arrows and scribbles. Ruining all of Wyatt’s carefully constructed paperwork.

“We can’t find information on the protégé as an adult,” Flynn said, “but I was able to get information on him as a teenager. His name is Kevin, and I’ve got several videos and pictures of him, including doing some lab work at MIT from Mason’s personal files. No last name yet but now that I’ve got the first name and I know he went there, I’ll dig up the last name soon enough. But all that is secondary to actually knowing how the boy talked and walked.”

“Impersonating someone in their past form isn’t as strong as doing it in their current form,” Wyatt countered as the others all sat and listened.

“Maybe not,” Flynn replied, “but it’s all we have. This guy, whoever he was, has vanished into the wind.” He glanced over at Rufus, probably to make sure Rufus hadn’t fallen asleep (again).

“So,” Flynn said. “What we do, is I impersonate the protégé on the first level of the dream and introduce the idea to Mason’s conscious mind. Then his subconscious mind feeds the idea back to him when we go deeper, onto the second level.”

Wyatt could feel his eyes lighting up. “So he gives himself the idea.”

“Precisely. It’s the only way it will stick, it has to seem self-generated.”

“Flynn, I am impressed.”

“Your condescension is, as always, much appreciated, thank you Wyatt.”

Flynn and Lucy then got into a debate about motivation like they were in Acting I class or something, and then Jiya started asking about mazes and Wyatt just tuned it all out until Lucy snapped, “Positive emotion beats negative emotion every time.”

Wyatt stared, as did everyone else, taking in Lucy’s flushed cheeks and dangerously glittering eyes.

Flynn put his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

“We all yearn for reconciliation,” Lucy finished, stumbling over her words, her voice getting small. “Love, that’s—that’s how you get catharsis.”

Denise cleared her throat. “Perhaps we should all take a break?”

Rufus and Jiya quickly cleared out, going to get lunch. Denise went to call her wife. Lucy muttered something about fiddling with the PASIV.

Wyatt tried not to get obviously stiff as Flynn approached. What, he honestly complimented the guy one time and Flynn decided that it had to be sarcastic? See if Wyatt ever complimented him again. Fucker. Wyatt was trying to be nice, dammit, they had to work together so might as well be somewhat civil—not that Wyatt had done a good job of that before when they’d been in the military together—but apparently Flynn wasn’t interested in that.

Or maybe Wyatt had been such an asshole that all Flynn could assume from him was sarcasm.

But now Flynn was walking up, all loose-limbed and stupidly stylish and…

“You’re working yourself too hard.” Flynn planted his hand on the table and leaned into Wyatt, into his space, and Wyatt had to struggle not to lean away—or lean into it. “When was the last time you slept? Dreamtime doesn’t count.”

“We have to get this ready.” Wyatt kept his eyes focused on the papers. Just keep focusing on the papers. “We’re on a deadline. Isn’t that why you’re here? The chance to perform the greatest mind heist of all time, to do what nobody else has done, to do the impossible?”

Flynn snorted and rolled his eyes. “You’re being hyperbolic,” he graveled. “And no, I don’t give a damn about the job.”

“Oh, right, Lucy, I forgot.” It was cruel of him, but he couldn’t stop himself. Jess had always said that he was the self-destructive type. “Pretty rich of you to claim you’re here for her after you left.”

“I’m not here just for her.” Flynn’s voice was crisp, clipped, the way it got when he was struggling to hold in his anger. “I’m here for you too, you idiot. Don’t pretend you’re fine and this isn’t taking a toll on you, too.”

“The time for you to support us was when Amy died,” Wyatt snapped, turning to face Flynn and hating that doing so felt like defeat. Flynn up close was like staring into the sun, or a hurricane, sweeping Wyatt off his feet, leaving him breathless and blind. “Instead you just fled.”

“Don’t act like I don’t know grief,” Flynn snapped. His eyes looked properly green in this light, earnest and angry, a riptide sweeping Wyatt under and he hated him, he hated him, he hated him so much. “I know it, I know it better than almost anyone. I learned to let go of Lorena and Iris, I learned to move on, but Lucy never let go of Amy.”

He grabbed Wyatt’s shoulder, and it was like warmth leeched into his entire body from Flynn’s palm. “She will drag us all down with her, Wyatt, if we don’t stop her. If we don’t get her to snap out of it. We’re all going to be lost. I lost a wife once. I wasn’t going to torture myself by watching Lucy sink into madness.”

“So you abandoned us instead.” Wyatt jerked himself back, out of Flynn’s reach. “Smooth move there.”

“Wyatt!”

Both men turned automatically as Lucy strode in. “I’ve spoken with Denise, explained things, she’s not going to take offense at Flynn’s comments. But Flynn, I’m sure an apology wouldn’t go amiss.”

Lucy and Flynn stared at one another, and Wyatt almost rolled his eyes. Flynn might kick up a fuss but he was always going to do what Lucy told him to in the end.

Sure enough, Flynn bowed his head, as if to a queen, and then strode crankily out of the room to go find Denise.

Lucy indicated Jiya, who had walked in behind her. “Wyatt, if you could take over Jiya’s training.”

 _Amy’s become too unstable_ , Lucy didn’t say. But Wyatt knew what she meant. Lucy couldn’t take Jiya under and train her anymore.

“Sure.” Wyatt rolled his shoulders. It wasn’t like he was in the middle of research or anything. It wasn’t like he already had a to do list longer than Flynn’s dick. Sure, he could totally take on training the newbie as well.

Fuck’s sake.

But this wasn’t Jiya’s fault, not in the slightest, so he looked over at her with as soft of a smile as he could manage. “You want to get hooked up and we’ll take you for a test drive?”

Jiya nodded.

Wyatt took a deep breath. All right then. He could do this.

He did, however, shoot a glare at the door that Flynn had gone through. Just because. It wasn’t like he could still feel the heat of Flynn’s hand on his arm or anything.

Not at all.

 

* * *

 

Jiya was so tired of dreaming.

Wyatt and Flynn were tag-teaming it on training her, and she wasn’t sure who she wanted to strangle more at the moment. Wyatt was methodical, clearly following the same curriculum he’d learned in the military’s program. There was nothing wrong with that except that it got boring quickly and Wyatt tended to think that working on something for less than ten hours in a row was kid talk.

Flynn, on the other hand, favored the ‘fling literally everything at you and see how you reacted’ method. Jiya wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d told her _if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball_. She never had any idea what he was going to do or what was going to happen next and it was making her insanely paranoid.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, there was clearly… well.

Jiya didn’t like to assume anything about the people around her. She’d always been a bit bad at that. People didn’t make sense—there was always a piece of them missing, or a piece of her, something, just out of her grasp. Like she was on the other side of a glass wall from everyone else, and she could peek over it on her tiptoes, or maybe if she built a stool, but first she had to learn how to make the stool and…

She didn’t know where she was going with this metaphor.

The point was, she liked engines. Architecture. There was no room for error, there was only the need for attention to detail. There was routine, there was rhythm, and there was beauty. And other nerds didn’t care if she rambled on and on about whatever interest had seized hold of her brain, because they were obsessed with the same things.

So people, she didn’t really get. She’d had enough of sticking her foot in her mouth to last her a lifetime, thanks. But Wyatt and Flynn—she wasn’t good with people but she wasn’t fucking blind. The way they would avoid touching or even looking at each other but would then subconsciously touch each other casually, intimately, Wyatt leaning into Flynn or Flynn putting his hand on Wyatt’s wrist…

“What’s their story?” she asked Rufus at one point.

Rufus was mixing some compounds together, but glanced up as Jiya nodded towards Wyatt and Flynn, who were sniping at each other while Wyatt poured over papers and Flynn did something on the computer. Jiya liked Rufus—she liked his jokes, and his hands, how they worked quickly and carefully with dangerous compounds. She liked his thick, muscled arms and his goofy smile and the way he would duck his head away, embarrassed, when she complimented him.

Not that he’d like her back. People didn’t really tend to do that. And the times she’d thought someone liked her back, she’d always been wrong and it had only ended in humiliation for everyone involved.

Rufus gave a small sigh. “I don’t know the whole thing, but one time Flynn admitted to me that he and Lucy and Wyatt were… sort of together.”

“Sort of? You’re either together or you aren’t.”

“I don’t think they ever talked about it the way that they should have. It was one of those… just kind of being close without ever actually having the full conversation type deal.”

Jiya rolled her eyes. “Why people can’t just say what they’re feeling and thinking… honesty’s better every time.”

“Most people don’t do so well with honesty.”

“Well, I do.”

Rufus gave her a smile and her stomach flipped. “And that’s why you’re the best.” Then he sobered up again. “Flynn still loves them. He didn’t say it but he didn’t have to. He did say… that if he’d stayed, he’d be enabling Lucy, and that he’d left to try and snap her out of it.”

“Snap her out of what?”

Rufus shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m sure you’ve noticed she’s… not firing on all cylinders.”

“I thought I was just misunderstanding something.”

Rufus snorted. “No, no she’s no longer in possession of her faculties. Three fries short of a happy meal. Wacko.”

“SG-1,” Jiya said with a grin.

Rufus grinned back at her. “And here I’d given up hope that we’d ever be compatible.”

“What? What for?”

“You’re Star Trek, I’m Star Wars. Never the twain shall meet.”

“Hey, that’s unfair, first of all…”

Rufus held up a hand. “How about you tell me about it over dinner?”

That brought Jiya up short. “I’m… as in a date?”

Rufus’s smile faltered. “Um… is that okay?”

“Oh, no, yes, yes it’s very okay.”

“You just sounded kind of…”

“No! No I’m interested, I thought—”

“I’m sorry, I’m shit with all that romance thing—”

“Well I’m shit with people, so.”

Rufus laughed and shook his head. “So we’re just a couple of idiots, aren’t we?”

Jiya found herself grinning back. “Maybe. But is that so bad?”

Rufus set aside his equipment and offered his arm to her. “No, no it’s not.”

 

* * *

 

It was only a matter of time until Lucy wanted to check on Jiya’s progress. “Let’s see what you can do now,” she said.

Flynn helped Jiya to get into the lawn chair and inject herself. The others could all do the catheters on themselves just fine, except for Rufus, who rarely sampled his own product. “I’m the bartender,” he said. “Not good if the bartender’s sampling the merchandise all the time.”

Fair enough. But Jiya still felt like a newbie, needing someone to help her.

She couldn’t help but notice how Flynn carefully avoided touching Lucy, letting Wyatt help Lucy set up instead. Even as Flynn pushed and pushed with Wyatt, setting him off, he treated Lucy like a ticking bomb.

Jiya got the impression that Lucy and Wyatt both hated this behavior, and that they would’ve preferred it reversed.

“Okay,” Flynn said, and then there was that now-familiar rush, that fuzzy feeling, that weird taste in the back of her throat, and she was falling under.

Different somnacin batches apparently felt different, because of the chemist who’d made them. Flynn swore he could tell who the chemist had been based on the somnacin, something Rufus had confirmed to Jiya over drinks. “I hooked him up, had him try them, and he guessed right every time. We made millions off other chemists betting on him.”

Jiya only knew the difference between the first batch she’d had when Lucy had put her under without Jiya knowing about it, and Rufus’s batches. And she infinitely preferred Rufus’s. Lucy’s had made her throw up from a migraine that evening, feeling overstimulated—more so than usual—until she literally went up onto the roof and screamed her lungs out just to let some of her pent-up anxiety out.

Rufus, though, had talked with her beforehand. “Don’t you worry,” he’d told her. “I want you to feel refreshed when you wake up.”

And she did. She couldn’t get rid of the weird taste in her mouth like she’d fallen asleep after drinking a huge glass of orange juice, but otherwise she felt fine. No migraines, no overstimulation, nothing. When she’d first come out of it and had felt good all day, she’d nearly hugged Rufus in relief. His pleased grin had been fucking sunshine to her heart.

Now—now she simply let the somnacin drag her under, trusting it, trusting Rufus—and found herself back on the streets of Paris.

“All right,” Lucy said. “Why don’t you show me what you can do.”

Jiya turned and looked around them. Hmm. This was all nice but a bit too modern and a bit too French.

The world around them melted away, and San Francisco, 1889, sprung up around them.

Jiya grinned. She had never been there herself—it was Flynn who’d told her to try building from history. “Real-world details will still exist. The Eiffel Tower was there in the 1920s. They can function as a cornerstone to help you. But the rest of it can all be your own imagination.”

“And history’s a soft spot of Lucy’s,” Wyatt had mumbled, shooting Flynn an accusing look.

Flynn had just winked at him.

Jiya gestured around her. “What do you think?”

Lucy looked… impressed, but also concerned.

A prospector walked by them and jostled Jiya. She frowned at him. “Could you tell your subconscious to chill?”

“Jiya, did Flynn and Wyatt not talk to you about projections?”

“They never had any,” Jiya said. “Flynn wanted me to focus on my architecture, manipulating the world. He said I’d handle the person’s subconscious once I had that down.”

“Shit,” Lucy muttered. “You need to stop changing the world.”

“Why? I have to show you what I can do. Look!” Jiya flicked her wrist and the town folded in on itself, the end of the street flipping up, coming over, defying gravity, putting the horse drawn buggies upside down, turning the sky into yet another ceiling.

The people around them began to gather, staring at Jiya with hostile eyes. Jiya could feel her instinct for danger creeping up the back of her neck. “Lucy?”

One of the people, a saloon girl, grabbed at her. Lucy shoved the woman away. “Leave her alone!”

There were too many of them—some of them grabbed her while others grabbed Lucy, preventing Lucy from helping her.

“Lucy!” Jiya screamed, fear overtaking her.

The crowd parted and a young woman approached them, a knife in her hand.

“Amy, don’t! Leave her alone!”

“Lucy!” Jiya fought, screaming, trying to get away. “Lucy, what’s happening, Lu—”

She woke up screaming, pain flaring in her stomach from the stab to the gut.

“Hey, hey, you’re safe, it’s okay, it’s not real,” Flynn gently took her hand. “It’s okay, you’re safe.”

“What happened?” Rufus demanded, hurrying over. “Jiya, hey, you’re all right.”

Jiya clutched at him, shaking, God that had felt so real, she could still feel it, it was so real, oh God…

“You didn’t warn her about projections,” Lucy snapped, sitting up and taking the catheter out.

“Yeah, because I wanted to take it one step at a time,” Flynn replied, his voice getting a little terse.

Jiya was grateful that Denise wasn’t here to see this. Denise wanted to oversee as much as she could but she had other concerns to deal with regarding Rittenhouse, so she couldn’t be there all the time. Thank God for that. Jiya didn’t want their employer to see them failing.

“I’ll be back,” Lucy said, walking out, rubbing at the gold locket around her neck.

“Fuck’s sake,” Wyatt said. He ran a hand through his hair. “Rufus can you—can you keep an eye on her?”

“Why me?” Rufus asked, rubbing Jiya’s back. He didn’t seem inclined to leave her and Jiya was grateful for it. That stabbed feeling wasn’t going away, a bad touch that haunted her skin and she needed it replaced, needed good touch…

“You’re a neutral party,” Flynn explained, his voice rough. “She’ll—Wyatt and I—there’s too much history.”

Rufus seemed to see the wisdom in this and nodded, getting up. He kissed the top of Jiya’s head. “I’ll be right back my love.”

Jiya nodded, releasing him and falling back against the lawn chair.

Flynn took the catheter out and then got up, walking over to the sink and grabbing a glass. “She’s apparently gotten worse, I’m guessing,” he said.

“…yes,” Wyatt admitted.

Flynn swore in Croatian under his breath and walked back over with the glass. “Projections are like white blood cells,” he explained. He started to reach out for her, then paused. “May I touch you?”

Jiya nodded.

Flynn passed her a glass of water, then with his other hand gently pushed her hair back out of her face, stroking it just a little. It didn’t feel sexual. More… paternal. Flynn had a fond but sad look in his eyes as he soothed her. “The projections will attack an invader. Just like white blood cells attacking an infection. That was what they did, because you changed too much in the dream.”

“That wasn’t—that was a coordinated attack, that wasn’t—that woman—”

“Oh great.” Wyatt scrubbed a hand across his face. “You’ve met Amy.”

“Amy?”

“Hey, hey, you’re okay.” Flynn kept soothing her, petting her hair until she calmed down again. “Don’t make me sing you Croatian lullabies, I’m told I’m horrible at it.”

“’Cause you are,” Wyatt muttered under his breath. There was a fond tone to his voice, though.

“Amy was…” Flynn sighed and sat down next to her as Jiya obediently drank her glass of water. “Amy was Lucy’s younger sister.”

“She’s a real charmer.”

“The real Amy was,” Wyatt snapped.

Flynn gave Wyatt a chastising look, and Wyatt subsided.

“Lucy told you not to use real locations for your building, correct?”

Jiya nodded. “Details, she said, but not the whole thing.”

“Right. A single room, an office in an otherwise invented building. A house in an otherwise invented neighborhood. That’s about as far as you can get, if you want to convince the mark they’re awake and somewhere you need them to be for interrogation purposes. But it’s tricky, and you can’t use too much. Otherwise your memories take over and you can lose track of reality and dreaming.

“But that’s not just for places. It’s people, too. Just like how a place in a dream isn’t really real, because it’s not the objective truth, it’s how you perceived it—so if you had a good day at the beach you’ll see it as a beautiful place but if I had a bad day I’ll perceive it as somewhere gloomy—people are the same way.

“Lucy blames herself for Amy’s death. So the Amy in her mind—that’s not the real Amy. It’s Lucy’s subconscious in Amy’s form. It’s… possessive of Lucy, angry, violent.”

“And it’s not fair to Amy, to the real Amy,” Wyatt added, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. “The real Amy was fuckin’ sunshine. We loved her. She was like our little sister too.”

“If you care so much how about you explain it,” Flynn snapped.

“Would one of you please just explain what happened and why Lucy’s subconscious wants to kill me?” Jiya demanded.

“Amy wants to kill everyone, it’s not personal,” Flynn said. He stood up. “I need some fresh air. I’ll be outside.”

He walked out. Wyatt’s shoulders slumped, and he stuffed a hand inside his pocket. “Amy… she died almost two years ago. It. It wasn’t…” Wyatt gestured helplessly. “Lucy and Amy’s mom, Carol Preston, you know her. She was dying of cancer, on life support at the hospital. We all knew the end was near. I mean, you’re an academic, of course you probably knew. It didn’t make Lucy’s life any easier, everyone in pretty much every scientific field watching your mom die.

“Something—something happened, to Lucy and Amy. We don’t know, Lucy won’t tell us. They went under, dreaming, dreaming all the time. I don’t know if it was to do something for Carol before she died, or to remember Carol as she had been, or what, but it got… Flynn and I were worried.

“One time, they woke up, and Amy refused to admit that this was the real world. She wouldn’t hug me or Flynn, she said we weren’t real. She refused to see her mom, said that it was just a projection. We got her to a therapist, and she seemed to be getting better.

“But then—Flynn and I weren’t home. We still had clients, and Lucy was busy with Amy and her mom but somebody had to deal with the dreamshare technology. So we were out, and Lucy had this whole night planned for her and Amy. Sisters’ night. And then—we got the call that—Lucy was—

“You gotta understand.” He looked at Jiya pleadingly, like a lost puppy left out in the rain. “You gotta understand, Amy was Lucy’s world. Lucy and her mom had a rough relationship, especially when Lucy found out she had a different father, that Carol’d had an affair—don’t tell her I told you that—but it was rough between them. Did you know Rittenhouse was a family thing? Yeah. Lucy hated that, she fought against it, and Carol did too sometimes but—Carol didn’t see them the way that Lucy did. Their dad died when they were young… Amy was all Lucy had to depend on, the only family she had who was decent.

“So we get this call and it’s Lucy screaming, and we thought—I don’t even know. That the military had learned Flynn and Lucy were the ones who stole the dreamshare technology and made it public, that Rittenhouse was getting us back for keeping the tech from them, I don’t know. Flynn got a location out of Lucy and we got to the hospital right as the police did.”

Wyatt swallowed, and the fear and anger and grief in his eyes was so palpable that Jiya flinched, looking away. She wasn’t good at eye contact at the best of times but right now, with so much raw emotion—it was more than she could handle.

“Amy had…” Wyatt took a deep breath. “Amy was convinced that she was still dreaming. That she and Lucy had to wake up—but the way that you wake yourself up from a dream—”

“Is dying,” Jiya finished.

Wyatt nodded. “She knew Lucy wouldn’t listen to her, so she convinced her therapist that Lucy was trying to kill her, got the therapist to declare Amy sane, and then she went to the hospital and she… she killed Carol.”

Jiya’s stomach dropped. There had never been a whiff of this in the news. “But…”

“Flynn and I worked hard to keep that part out of the papers,” Wyatt said quietly. “It helped that the higher ups in academia didn’t want it getting out. Telling the world that their beloved idol in… what, half a dozen fields of academia that she’d been murdered by her insane daughter? Better to just say that the cancer finally had its way, right?”

Wyatt gave a small, bitter laugh. “Anyway. Amy got up onto the roof of the hospital, where she tried to convince Lucy to jump too. Lucy refused, saying this was the real world. So Amy told her she’d prove it to her and she…”

Oh, no.

Wyatt swallowed, tried to speak, couldn’t, looked away.

“She jumped off,” Jiya finished for him.

Wyatt nodded. “Because of the therapist and all… she got Lucy accused of her murder, and Carol’s. I think that Amy thought with no other choice, her back to the wall, Lucy would have to commit suicide and join her. Instead—Flynn and I got her out of the states just in time. It’s why we’re on this job. Denise says she can get Lucy cleared of all charges.

“Lucy never wanted to be in dreamshare, all right? You gotta understand that. Lucy wanted to be a history professor. She was at Stanford, she was happy—frustrated that she wasn’t getting tenure, sure, don’t get her drunk or she’ll go on about that for hours—but she was happy, okay? And Carol—Carol manipulated her into joining Project Morpheus.

“And I’ll be honest here, I hate myself for being glad because that’s how I met her. That’s how Flynn and I both met her. Flynn was a spy who had infiltrated the Russian team, I was on the American team.”

“And you fell in love.”

“What? No. Yes.” Wyatt looked like he was now considering following in Amy’s footsteps and flinging himself out a window. “We never. It was never. None of us said anything. But yes. We were. Together, I guess you could say. Flynn and Lucy and I, that was how it was.”

“But now it’s just been the two of you.”

“Amy started popping up in Lucy’s head,” Wyatt explained. “Lucy feels guilty for some reason. Like maybe she should’ve done more, I don’t know, she won’t talk about it with me. She doesn’t talk about anything with me anymore. But the Amy in Lucy’s head—she’s what we call a shade. A shade is someone you know, not like normal projections that are just random people you’ve met that your subconscious remembers. It’s a specific person, a memory of them, and a manifestation of your subconscious—or a part of your subconscious.

“They tend to really manifest as someone you can’t let go of. A spouse, a parent, your best friend. And if you don’t banish them, if you don’t find a way to overcome them and face the reason why they’re here, they can take over. They become… twisted. Amy, she’s Lucy’s guilt. Jess, my…” Wyatt swallowed. “My wife. She died and I felt it was my fault. She became a shade. And with time I learned how to—with therapy, not gonna lie—overcome that guilt and face my own behavior and move on.”

“But Lucy isn’t doing that.”

“No.” Wyatt held his hands up in a half-shrug of despair. “And I thought the right thing to do was to stay with Lucy, not let her be alone. I’m not always the best at it, hell I was shit at it with my wife, but I wanted to be loyal. I wanted to be better with Lucy than I was with Jess. Flynn saw it differently.”

“You’re mad at him for leaving.”

“Hell yes I am. He abandoned us.” Wyatt gave another of those rough bitter laughs, the sound coming out like it was scraped from his throat with a knife. “But my sticking around—I wonder now if it was the right thing. Or if I just enabled her. It feels like half the time she just takes me for granted nowadays.”

“Maybe that’s why Flynn left, then,” Jiya said. “Sometimes… if you’re around the person, it just makes it worse. Like with drug addicts, sometimes if you stick around, you’re just enabling them, and you have to take care of yourself, too. Doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love you and Lucy. But maybe he thought that by leaving he’d show her how destructive she was being. Just like how Amy thought by dying she’d wake up and convince Lucy to wake up too.”

Wyatt stared at her for a moment. “That… makes a lot of sense. Flynn’s not… he’s not a coward. He never has been. I didn’t understand why he was going. It felt selfish, it didn’t feel like the man I… I knew.” He paused, then shook himself. “Anyway, you’ll want to be able to tell the difference between reality and dreaming.”

He reached under his shirt and pulled out some dog tags. Jiya hadn’t even known they were hanging around his neck. “You’ll want to get yourself a totem.”

“A what?”

Wyatt walked over and sat down next to her.

“Flynn invented it,” he explained, showing her his dog tags. “The idea of a totem. It’s something that’s utterly unique to you, something you can tell if it’s false. Now most people see my dog tags and they think, I’m wearing mine, right?”

Jiya nodded.

“Wrong.”

Wyatt turned the dog tag over and showed her the name.

_Dave Baumgardner._

“He’s the one who shot himself,” Jiya whispered. Then she realized. “You’re—you’re the one—”

“I thought I was still dreaming,” Wyatt admitted. “Flynn, he knew it, somehow, saw it in my eyes, I don’t know. He pinned me down, got the gun from me, and showed me the inside of his wedding ring. It’s got a Croatian quote on it. He said in dreams, the quote was gone and the ring was blank. That’s how he knew he was in a dream, all he had to do was check the ring. If he couldn’t mentally take the quote away from the ring, if it stayed there no matter what he did to it, then he couldn’t change reality, which meant he wasn’t in a dream. After that the military adopted the idea and we all took on totems. This one’s mine. In a dream I can change the name to anything, but if I can’t and it says Dave’s name… I know I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

“What’s Lucy’s?”

“That’s for her to know,” Wyatt replied. “And for her to tell you if she trusts you.”

Jiya nodded.

Rufus entered. “Lucy’s fine, she’s with Denise now, something about Rittenhouse, all’s good, I thought I’d… hey, everything okay?”

Jiya realized how much of a wreck Wyatt looked. “Yeah, we’re all good.” He stood up. “You want to take Jiya shopping so she can get a totem?”

“Yeah, sure thing.” Rufus offered his arm and Jiya took it, holding on tightly as they walked out.

Jiya glanced back at Wyatt, who was now staring out the window, but followed Rufus out. “What’s really up?” Rufus asked.

Stepping out into the light of the late afternoon sun, out onto the street with real, genuine people, was almost like being doused with cold water—but somehow, far more comforting at the same time. “He told me about Lucy and Amy.” She recounted what had happened.

Rufus nodded. “Makes sense with what Flynn’s told me. Kind of reminds me… I had this guy I knew. He was my mentor, more like a dad by the end honestly. Big tech guy, made billions. We met at a science fair when I was a teenager and he took me under his wing. Got me into MIT.

“But he lost sight of what was important. He’s been obsessed with—get this—time travel. Right? Crazy until you consider what we’ve done with dreaming. And maybe it is possible, I don’t know, but his obsession with it was too much. He was doing things I didn’t agree with, making deals with people I thought were bad news, so long as they funded his research.

“And so I… I told him I wasn’t going to stand for that, and I left. Told him to give me a call when he’d woken up to reality and had realized how far he’d fallen. But he never did call.” Rufus gave a small, pained smile. “I thought I was family to him. I thought, of course he’s going to choose me over whatever insane shit he’s been up to. It hurt, to realize that I wasn’t actually that important to him. Flynn must be hurting too. To realize that Lucy’s grief and guilt over a dead person matters more than the ones in front of her who love her.”

Jiya squeezed his arm. “I’m sorry, Rufus.” She was sorry for all of them.

“Hey, I’m fine.” Rufus grinned at her. “So, let’s get you a totem. And maybe some dinner?”

Jiya kissed him swiftly, delighting in the smile that Rufus gave her in response, and let him lead her through the streets of Paris.

 

* * *

 

Flynn took a long walk, clearing his head, trying to stuff down the anger and despair, the desire to tear after Lucy and haul her to him and never let her go, to shake her and shout _what the fuck are you doing!?_

Instead he found himself in a church.

Fuck, he hadn’t been in one of these places since Lorena and Iris had died. At the funeral. Lorena had always been the one with faith. Flynn… hadn’t. He could never stop questioning.

He sat down in a pew, looking up at the painted altar.

Sometimes, he’d wondered if God had led him to Project Morpheus, to dreamsharing, or if it had been something else. He’d spoken with Lucy about that, once, and she’d replied, _what if He led me to you?_

Back then he’d most certainly believed that God had led him to her. His shining light.

Now…

He listened to the evensong, and then quietly made his exit, walking back through the shadowed streets to the warehouse. No one was there when he got back, so he occupied himself with looking over Wyatt’s paperwork and Jiya’s drawings for the levels.

Three levels. This was going to be insane.

There were the sound of footsteps outside, and Flynn recognized the sound before he ever saw the person’s face.

Flynn leaned back against the table, nodding at Wyatt as he entered. “Is Jiya okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Wyatt nodded, running a hand through his hair, as if that would somehow stop it from flopping into his face. “Rufus is with her now, I think they’re a thing.”

“Given that they were kissing on the sidewalk last night, I’d say so.”

“What? When was this?”

Flynn shrugged. “You were doing research. Do you ever sleep?”

Wyatt glared at him, and then hip checked him, forcing Flynn to move to the side so that Wyatt could gather up some papers. “I get enough sleep when I’m dreaming.”

Flynn grabbed Wyatt’s wrist, stopping him. God, Wyatt had always responded so well to touch. A little hand here, a lean in there, a gentle press of fingers to his wrist or the back of his neck… the surefire way to get Wyatt into a pliant puddle was to massage his shoulders. If Flynn were to forge Wyatt, this was where he would start—that need for touch, that careful stiffness that turned into pliancy the moment loving pressure was applied.

“That’s not the same thing, and you know it,” he said. The military had proven that. Men needed sleep, real sleep, not just somnacin-induced.

Wyatt looked like he wanted to pull away, but Flynn recognized the exhausted look in his eyes.

So he waited.

A moment, a second, an hour later, Wyatt pushed the papers away and the tension bled out of his shoulders. “I spoke to Jiya. Or—she spoke to me. And I realized that maybe… that there was another side to this that I hadn’t considered.”

“To this?”

“To us. What happened.” Wyatt looked up at him, and for the first time since Flynn had come back he could see the scared look in Wyatt’s face, his blue eyes dark and shaky. “I thought you were just running away but what Jiya said… I think that I was too harsh with you.”

Flynn wanted to snort and say something derisive, but he also didn’t want to scare Wyatt into anger again. “Is it really so difficult for you to imagine that I had the best interests of you and Lucy in mind?”

Wyatt shrugged. “It was easier to be angry.”

“Wyatt. I never—I thought she would come after me. I thought that it would make her realize how unhealthy her choices were. And then when she didn’t, I knew if I came back it would just prove her right, and she would feel justified. Once I left I had to stay away.”

“And you couldn’t have told me that? Explained?”

“You weren’t interested in hearing me.”

Wyatt looked like he might crumble completely, then shook himself, muttered something that sounded like ‘fuck it’, and grabbed Flynn by the shirt, pulling him in and kissing him.

Flynn managed to get his hands on Wyatt’s waist, but then Wyatt was pulling back before Flynn could slow it down, make the kiss actually worth something. “I—fuck I need to—I should work, I have work to do, Mason went to Switzerland last year and—”

Oh, no. Flynn had his number now. He swept the paperwork to the side, some of it falling onto the floor, grabbed Wyatt and hauled him up onto the table.

Wyatt let out a squeak.

“Nuh-uh.” Flynn braced his hands on either side of Wyatt’s hips, not bearing his weight down on him but looming, just a little. “If we’re finally fucking doing this then we’re doing it properly.”

“Define properly,” Wyatt shot back. “I should’ve known you’d be a jackass about this—”

Flynn kissed him, and this time, he took Wyatt’s face in his hands, tilted his chin up, angled it, scraped his nails along Wyatt’s scalp. Wyatt whimpered a little and Flynn swept his tongue against Wyatt’s lip, asking for permission, biting down when Wyatt opened up eagerly the way Flynn had predicted he would.

Wyatt tasted like coffee—God they all probably did, all of them downing gallons of the stuff at this point—and he clung to Flynn’s shoulders, squirming, making Flynn wonder when the last time was that Wyatt had gotten any action. Not even a proper fuck, but even just a hook up in a bar or a hand job from Lucy.

“Somebody’s needy,” Flynn growled.

“You’re—you’re just as bad,” Wyatt spat. “Unless you’ve got a boyfriend in Mombasa.”

Flynn slid his hands down from Wyatt’s face to his neck, his thumbs stroking back and forth. He’d seen Wyatt fiddling with his ties enough to figure out that Wyatt had a thing for being touched here, and sure enough Wyatt swallowed hard and shuddered from head to toe. “Last person who touched me was you.”

Wyatt’s mouth dropped open. It was a very pretty look on him. “But—that was—”

Flynn brushed their mouths together and Wyatt’s sentence dried up. “And when was the last time someone did this to you, hmm?”

Wyatt arched up, seeking more of Flynn’s touch, trying to grind their bodies together, greedy. “Not since you,” he mumbled.

“You and—”

“We never. No. I wouldn’t, not when she was like… this. It wouldn’t really be Lucy.”

Flynn understood.

“Well I’m here now.” He kissed the corner of Wyatt’s mouth. “And we’re going to unwind you, look at you, all tense, poor puppy.”

He slid his hands down to Wyatt’s chest and pushed him firmly down onto the table. Wyatt’s chest heaved under Flynn’s touch, his eyes black with just the rim of burning blue around them. “You need a nice firm hand, don’t you?”

Wyatt looked like he might claw his own skin off. “ _Flynn_.”

The thing was, he’d never wanted to be in control of anyone the way that he wanted to with Wyatt. He could be in charge, on occasion, with his partners and he’d enjoyed it well enough. But it wasn’t a heady rush like he got when it was Wyatt.

“Shh, I’ve got you.” Poor thing, and here Flynn had thought that Lucy at least was exercising her fondness for control with Wyatt. They both needed it, and with the rest of Lucy’s life spiraling out of control, Flynn had thought that she’d seize the opportunity to take a bit of it back.

It seemed that he’d overestimated Lucy and Wyatt’s ability to start up a relationship.

Flynn wanted to ask if the two of them really hadn’t done anything—if the time in the dream was the only—but this wasn’t the place. Not when he had Wyatt strung out underneath him and already prepared to beg, if the way Wyatt was shaking was any indication.

“Why don’t I get you undressed,” Flynn mused, “and you can show me how much you missed me, hmm?”

Wyatt whined and surged up, kissing Flynn all over. “I’m gonna be so good for you. Promise, promise I’ll be so good—”

Flynn hushed him as he started undoing Wyatt’s layers. Wyatt’s layers were his shield, keeping him in, tight and constricting and binding. Flynn knew the feeling. His clothes were a shield too, although he used them differently. He’d always wondered what Wyatt would be like with a collar…

They’d never really done this properly. Just rushed frottage against a wall, or handjobs in the shower. But oh, God, he was doing this properly now, he was making up for lost time.

“You want me to fuck you?” He had to be sure.

Wyatt nodded, planting small kisses along Flynn’s neck. “ _Please_.”

Flynn shoved Wyatt’s shirt off, finally able to slide his hands over Wyatt’s bare skin, feel the flush in his chest. “Since you asked so nicely.”

Wyatt pulled back to glare at him, which gave Flynn the opportunity to attack Wyatt’s pants which then gave Wyatt the chance to try and rip Flynn’s shirt off. “I hate your stupid clothes, I really fucking hate them, please let me burn them.”

“Listen sweetheart just because you’ve got no fashion sense so you imitate the Hugo Boss models in _Vogue_ doesn’t mean that all of us are fucking pattern-blind.”

“I wore stripes with polka dots _once_.” Wyatt got Flynn’s shirt off and lifted his hips so Flynn could yank Wyatt’s pants down. “Why do you never let me fucking forget—”

“You looked like Greg Brady that one time.”

“You said I looked good in pink!”

“You looked better when it had your come on it.” Flynn had jacked Wyatt off in the dream that time while Wyatt was tied to a chair—one of his most fun memories in dreamsharing if he was being honest. He pulled the condom out of his wallet (not that he planned to ever use it, but you never knew when someone around you would need one and you could score with a mark by being a wingman, welcome to the life of a conman) and the packet of lube.

Wyatt raised an eyebrow. “Looking to score?”

“Says the man I’m about to fuck. Unless you’d like to be rawed?”

Wyatt flushed.

Heat spread through Flynn and he almost had to reach down and grab the base of his cock to keep from losing himself completely. “Would you like that?”

“Probably not smart this time, I’m—I haven’t been with anyone besides you and—that wasn’t even the whole—we never hit a home run if you know what I mean and before that the military kept us clean but. It’s probably best… I haven’t gotten tested since we left the project…”

Flynn shook his head. He wouldn’t have done it, even if Wyatt had said yes, for the same reasons. There was no reason for him not to be clean, but he hadn’t been tested since he’d left the military and he wasn’t going to risk Wyatt’s health for anything, slim as the chance might be.

“I’ve got you,” he promised instead, and then he set his mouth to Wyatt’s neck and started seeing if Wyatt still made those delicious noises when Flynn bit him.

(Conclusion: he did.)

Wyatt spread his legs, complying as Flynn started massaging his thighs. It was one thing to get off rutting against each other in the barracks or in hotel rooms off the high of a job gone right, but it was another to hit a full home run—and on a goddamn table in a goddamn warehouse, no less.

 _Real classy, Flynn,_ he told himself.

But Wyatt didn’t seem all that disposed to move to somewhere more private or conventional, and they couldn’t exactly leave the stuff here unguarded, so. Tryst in a warehouse it was.

Flynn kept teasing Wyatt, kissing his neck, biting, sucking Wyatt’s tongue into his mouth, as he slowly worked Wyatt to open pliancy, slicking his fingers and gently massaging until he could slide a finger in easy as anything. Flynn’s first time with a guy—the only person he’d been with before Lorena, incidentally, a close friend that had lost his life in war as Flynn had desperately tried to staunch the bleeding—hadn’t exactly been fun. He’d been in love and they’d been able to laugh together over the awkwardness and that had made up for it but it had still been the most awkward and disappointing sexual thing he’d ever done.

He wanted better for Wyatt.

Flynn added a second finger as Wyatt gave up and just bit down hard on his shoulder, muffled little moans escaping him on each thrust as he shoved himself down onto Flynn’s touch, their harsh pants the only strong sound in the air besides the slick sound of Flynn sliding his fingers in and out.

“You’re perfect,” he murmured, his lips brushing Wyatt’s sweat-stained temple. Wyatt preened under praise, verbal affirmation definitely his love language. “You’re doing perfect, _štene_ , just keep relaxing.”

Wyatt finally let go of Flynn’s shoulder, a perfect set of teeth marks left behind on the skin. “I want—Fl— _Garcia_ —want—” He was slurring his words and his eyes were glazed over.

“You sure?”

“Yes,” Wyatt chanted, kissing Flynn over and over, sloppy and shallow. “Yes, yes, yes, c’mon, please—”

“Shh, okay, I’ve got you, I’ve got you _draga_.” He slid his fingers out.

No sooner had he done that then Wyatt grabbed Flynn’s cock, squeezing, and Flynn nearly went cross-eyed. Oh holy _fuck_.

Wyatt stroked him a few times, playing with the foreskin like it was a brand new toy, and Flynn had to yank Wyatt’s hand away before this ended in a few damning seconds. “Lie back,” he instructed, guiding Wyatt with his hands even as he said the words.

He worked the condom on—goddamn it had been a while since he’d used one of these—and then gently kissed and petted Wyatt as he started to guide himself inside. He could feel Wyatt going tense, his body instinctively wondering (and rightfully so) what the fuck was going on down there, but Flynn just kept soothing him and petting him, giving him little kisses all over his face, until Wyatt was squirming with need again.

“There you go,” Flynn praised, and Wyatt really did preen then, like a cat given cream.

Flynn started moving slowly, shallowly, and Wyatt made a needy noise and responded, thrusting his hips back in time with Flynn’s movements. Soon he was fitting his teeth around Flynn’s other shoulder, whining in the back of his throat, as Flynn fucked into him hard and deep as he could get.

He had to brace one hand on the table, his other at Wyatt’s lower back as he held him, sliding in and out, and Wyatt had his legs hooked around Flynn’s hips like he’d never let Flynn out again. God help them if Rufus and Jiya or, oh fuck, Denise, came back in and found them but he didn’t care. He’d missed Wyatt and Lucy, missed them like limbs, and if Lucy was out of his reach—had always been beyond his reach—well, at least he had Wyatt again, Wyatt trusting him, Wyatt whining and moaning for him, letting Flynn fuck him into oblivion on a goddamn table—

Jesus _Christ_ it had been forever, he wasn’t going to last long. Wyatt was tight, and had never done this before so was just clenching like he was hungry for it, unable to fully relax, and hoo God that was doing a lot to Flynn, that was doing—so much, holy shit, oh fuck—

“You gotta let go,” Flynn whispered, kissing Wyatt’s ear, tugging on the lobe with his teeth. “C’mon, _draga_ , let go for me, I want to feel you let go.”

Wyatt moaned, shaking all over, and then he went stiff and tightened around Flynn even more—holy fuck—and came, staining both of their chests.

Oh Jesus—holy hell—Flynn got rough, striped Wyatt’s back with his nails, as Wyatt got even louder as Flynn lost control and buried himself in him completely, lost in the smell and feel and taste of sex as he fucked himself dry inside of Wyatt.

They collapsed onto the table, Flynn on top of Wyatt, still holding him up a bit. His chest was heaving and they were sticking together from the come and the sweat, messy, debauched, undoubtedly stinking, but Flynn couldn’t have given less of a damn.

Wyatt was stubborn, self-loathing, and either refused to give himself what he wanted or grabbed for it, greedy and selfish, without thinking about the consequences. He was hot headed, impulsive, and emotional—and he’d clearly paid the price for it. The Wyatt that Flynn had seen these last couple of weeks was not the Wyatt that he’d known and come to love, this controlled soldier, this silent untiring assistant of Lucy’s.

He wanted that Wyatt, their real Wyatt, back.

Flynn pushed himself up, but kept his hands on the edge of the table, fingers splayed. “Come back to my room with me.”

Wyatt stared at him. His face was flushed, sweaty, his hair sticking up in some parts and plastered to his forehead in others. “I—”

Flynn kissed him softly. “Don’t say no. Say what you want. You can have what you want, Wyatt, it’s okay. You don’t have to snatch for it or deny yourself.”

Wyatt trembled, and then reached out, wrapping his hands around Flynn’s shoulders, like Flynn was all he had keeping him from floating away. “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay. Take me—take me back with you.”

 

* * *

 

The night before Mason’s flight was scheduled to go, they went over the dream levels. “We have 1893,” Lucy said, “1780 for the second level…”

“I’m told I look good in 18th century outfits,” Flynn commented.

“…and World War II for the third.”

“Because what man doesn’t love the history of war,” Denise muttered.

“We’ll have twenty minutes on the first level, six months on the second, ten years on the third,” Lucy went on. “Denise’s agents are working the flight so we’ll have full control once the plane takes off until we land. Rufus is our dreamer on the first level, Wyatt is our dreamer on the second, Flynn is our dreamer on the third. Our kicks are synchronized to the song _Return to Pooh Corner_ , each kick will send us back up a level until we wake up. Three layers down, three layers back up.” She looked around at all of them. “Are we clear?”

Everybody nodded.

 

* * *

 

It was fucking raining on the first level.

Wyatt glared at Rufus as they all met up—sans umbrellas. “You couldn’t have cooled it with the champagne?”

“Hey, you don’t get to fly first class every day,” Rufus shot back.

“We have to find Mason,” Lucy said. “We have to—”

“Um, Lucy?” Jiya said in a small voice. “Why are people pointing guns at us?”

Wyatt whipped out his own gun—not period appropriate but whatever—and held it up as, sure enough, the projections around them, Mason’s projections, started to advance and close in.

“What’s happening?” Jiya asked, her voice breaking.

“He’s militarized!” Lucy snapped.

“I’ll find Mason,” Rufus said.

Flynn grabbed Wyatt. “It’s our time, point man,” he said, and then he was squeezing Wyatt’s shoulder and they were moving.

“How the hell is Rufus going to convince Mason! You’re the only forger we’ve got unless Rufus has been lying to us about his skills this whole time!” Wyatt yelled, firing.

On his left he could see Denise pulling a gun and firing as well, helping to cover Lucy and Jiya. Fuck, there were a ton of them.

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, _draga_ ,” Flynn noted, conjuring up a grenade launcher.

Wyatt raised his eyebrows, turned on in spite of himself.

Flynn hefted the launcher with ease, took aim, and fired, handling the kickback without pause.

“Did that to Lindberg in a dream once,” Flynn noted. “Fun times.”

“That was also when you shot Dave,” Wyatt shot back.

“Dave brought a ‘20s pistol to an automatic firearm fight.”

“He was using period appropriate weaponry, asshole.”

“Let’s go!” Lucy yelled.

Kevin was black, and American, Wyatt thought, maybe Rufus was just going to hope he looked enough like an older version and was going to wing it with Mason?

They fought their way through to a warehouse—always handy and almost always in existence no matter what year it was in the dream. “We have ten minutes,” Flynn said. “Everyone okay?”

Rufus strode in, dragging an unconscious Mason behind him. “Don’t ask.”

Denise coughed, and Wyatt turned along with the rest of them—and saw the blood blooming on her shirt.

Fuck.

“How is he militarized!” Lucy demanded.

“I don’t know!” Wyatt replied.

“You must have missed something!”

But he checked everything, he checked—he went over all of it—all of it—

—all of it except the papers from the night Flynn had fucked him.

Oh no.

Wyatt looked desperately over at Flynn, furious and panicked all at once. It wasn’t Flynn’s fault, of course it wasn’t. Once he would have blamed Flynn. He would’ve yelled at him and been a complete asshole. But this was all his fault. He shouldn’t have gotten distracted, or he should have gone back to his research afterwards.

Fuck.

This was all on him. Mason was militarized, Denise was injured, they were majorly screwed, and it was all his fault.

Great.

Flynn pulled out his gun and strode toward Denise, only for Lucy to grab his wrists, stopping him. “What do you think you’re doing!?”

“I’m shooting her!” Flynn yelled. “Dammit, Lucy, she’s in agony, I’m waking her up!”

“It won’t wake her up!” Lucy yelled.

Everyone stared, including Wyatt. “…what do you mean?” Flynn asked, his voice taut.

“In this sedative, you don’t wake up,” Rufus said. “If you get killed, you drop into Limbo.”

Wyatt nearly threw up. “What!?”

“What’s Limbo?” Jiya demanded, her voice high pitched.

“Raw, unconstructed dream space,” Flynn said. “Nothing is down there except for whatever might have been left behind by whoever in our dream was down there before.”

Wyatt wanted to bang his head repeatedly against the wall. Shit. _Shit._

Only one of them had been to Limbo before.

Lucy.

She and Amy had gone down there, that was where they had been when Amy had lost her mind.

“H-how long would we be stuck down there?” Jiya sounded young right then. She was technically a good seven years younger than the rest of them, although Wyatt often forgot that given Jiya's maturity and no-nonsense attitude. But right now, she really sounded like it.

“Decades?” Rufus suggested.

“And you knew about this?” Flynn sounded betrayed, which, fair. “And you went along with it?”

Rufus cleared his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

“Why the fuck—”

“Because he’s the protégé,” Jiya said.

Wyatt gaped at her. “What?”

“He’s the protégé,” Jiya repeated.

 

* * *

 

Rufus met Connor Mason at a science fair when he was fifteen.

Mason had been impressed with his work, and Rufus, well. How could he not be impressed with Connor Mason? The man was a pioneer. A genius.

But he’d promised Kevin—his little brother—that he’d go see his basketball game. Dad was nonexistent and Rufus knew he wasn’t a replacement, exactly, but he was all that Kevin had so. He was going to that game. _Sorry, sir, I’d love to chat with you but I promised my brother…_

He’d gotten a call from Mason the next day. Turned out, his ability to honor his word and keep his priorities straight had impressed Mason more than the science.

Mason had been there for him through everything. He’d flown halfway across the world to help Rufus through his meltdown at MIT when he’d been convinced he didn’t belong there and couldn’t keep up, the imposter syndrome rearing its ugly head. They’d spent countless hours pouring over theorems. It was Mason who’d introduced him to jazz and taught him how to dance ‘properly’ to impress a date, Mason who’d watched _Star Wars_ with him.

And then the damn time travel idea had taken hold and wouldn’t leave.

Mason poured everything into it—literally everything. He never stopped to consider the ethical dilemmas, the quandaries, he just wanted to be able to say he’d done it.

And Rufus… Rufus couldn’t watch that happen. Especially once Mason considered partnering with Rittenhouse to get the funding he needed.

“You’re running your company, your baby, into the ground over this,” he’d told him.

But for once, Mason hadn’t listened.

Rufus had seen only one way to get Mason to wake up—he’d left. He’d hoped that it would shake some sense into Mason. In fact, he’d been almost certain. Those first few weeks he’d been eager, anticipating Mason’s phone call, the apologies, ready to help Mason course correct.

Just like his first phone call from Mason had come when not expected, so did this phone call not come when Rufus had been convinced of it.

Heartbroken, betrayed, angry, he had ended up in dreamshare, becoming a chemist, fascinated by the idea of people escaping reality to dream. It sounded like the kind of thing Mason would have invented. He’d been in Mombasa to stay far away from Mason’s enterprises and had ended up meeting Flynn.

They’d commiserated and when Flynn had brought Lucy to him, Rufus knew why the second she said the name.

Flynn was giving Rufus his chance.

Now—now he couldn’t let this inception fail. He had to save Connor from himself, from Rittenhouse, he had to stop this before the man he’d come to view as a father went too far down the path to go back. Jiya and Flynn knew, but none of the others did. When Rufus had split, he’d buried himself deep, and since Flynn was the forger, well. It was easy enough to lie and claim he couldn’t dig up anything on Mason’s supposed protégé.

Wyatt was gaping, while Denise and Lucy looked more like they were putting together puzzle pieces and cursing themselves for not figuring it out sooner.

“I’ll stay up here,” Rufus told them. “I’m the dreamer on this level, and I gave Mason the idea. Flynn can feed it to him on the second level just like we planned, as me. He’s been studying me for years, he’ll do it. Then on the third level—Flynn and Jiya will know what to do.”

“I can’t believe this,” Wyatt muttered. “Am I the only one here who’s at all honest? Who doesn’t have some hidden motive?”

“Oh come off it, Wyatt,” Flynn snapped. “Like Rufus’s motives aren’t any worse than yours.” He looked at Rufus. “Even if I am going to punch you for not telling the rest of us about the sedative.”

“This whole thing would be fine,” Lucy replied for Rufus, “if Wyatt had done his research properly!”

“Y’know what, Lucy?” Wyatt snapped. “No, I’m not fucking taking that. I know I screwed up, okay? I get it. But I have stuck by you this whole time as you’ve taken the fast train to crazy town, because I love you. Because I didn’t want to repeat my mistakes. I wanted to do better for you and Flynn than I did for Jess, to stay instead of storming out all the time, but instead you’ve screwed us. You’ve been screwing us ever since Amy died and you chose some warped memory of her over us, the people who’re still alive, who’re right in front of you!”

“Then I guess we’re even now,” Lucy snapped back, “because you’ve screwed us right up with this militarization.”

“Both of you, stop it,” Denise ordered, even as she wheezed in pain. “There is only one person whose interpersonal issues we need to be discussing right now, and that is Connor Mason. Whether we like it or not, the only way forward is downward, to the next level. So let’s get on it before I bleed out.”

Rufus nodded.

“Second level it is,” Flynn said, carefully moving in between Lucy and Wyatt.

Rufus didn’t miss how both leaned into him, like ships seeking port in a storm.

 

* * *

 

There was slight turbulence on this second level, Lucy noted. But it was fine. “We’re running the Culper gambit.”

“That didn’t work last time,” Wyatt warned.

“What’s the Culper gambit,” Jiya asked.

“Lucy goes to the mark and tells them that she’s their subconscious and that they’re dreaming,” Flynn explained. “She claims she’s their security.”

“Which would work, if it wouldn’t cause the mark to, y’know, just shoot themselves out of the dream,” Wyatt added.

“Up ahead is the plantation,” Jiya said. “Not a replica of any in particular, I combined Mt. Vernon with a few others to make up a new one.”

“Good girl,” Flynn praised.

“We get in, I distract the mark, we prepare him to recall his important idea, which he will remember on the third level, finding it in his safe,” Lucy said. “We’ve got one chance to make this work, so let’s go.”

She sounded more confident than she felt. First the militarization—which wasn’t—she shouldn’t have been so harsh with Wyatt about that, fuck, she’d messed it all up—and now convincing Mason he was dreaming and that he needed to go under another level—

Lucy took a deep breath. She could do this. She could do this.

They entered the party in the plantation, populated with Mason’s projections, all decked out in 18th century garb—as was her team.

Flynn did look good in a cravat, she had to say.

Mason was in the center of a group, telling some amusing anecdote that had everyone laughing. Lucy approached him, smiling. “Mason?”

 

* * *

 

“She’s good at this,” Jiya murmured, watching from the sidelines with Wyatt as Lucy convinced Mason that Rittenhouse was trying to break into his subconscious and that he had to work with her, as his subconscious bodyguard that he’d hired, to track those Rittenhouse interlopers down.

“She’s the best,” Wyatt said truthfully. Lucy had always been the best. That was why it hurt so much when she became… this shell.

“We have to move,” Flynn added quietly, nodding at Denise.

The Homeland agent was coughing, discreetly, but still. Wyatt could see blood on her handkerchief.

Fuck.

They got upstairs to the second floor, in one of the bedrooms. A moment later Lucy arrived with Mason.

“We need to go deeper,” Lucy lied. “A dream within a dream, infiltrate Temple’s mind, find out what he’s planning so we can get back at him. Are you ready?”

Mason nodded.

Lucy guided him onto the bed and plugged him in. She looked up at Wyatt, and he saw what she was going to say.

He shook his head. “It’s okay.”

It was, and it wasn’t, all at the same time. But they’d deal with that later.

Wyatt helped Flynn to lie down. “Security’s going to run you down hard,” Flynn noted, letting Wyatt hook him up.

“And I will lead them on a merry chase.”

Flynn chuckled softly, staring up at Wyatt with a fond expression that made Wyatt’s heart twist. “Just be back before the kick.”

Wyatt rolled his eyes. “Go to sleep, Flynn.”

Flynn reached up, his movements a little clumsy as the drug took hold, and took Wyatt by the lapel of his jacket, tugging him down and kissing him softly. “Be careful.”

“I—I will be.”

It was just barely mumbled, but Wyatt heard it all the same: “I love you.”

Wyatt guided Flynn back down onto the carpet, and then looked over at the others.

At Lucy.

He moved over, checking on her vitals as she slept. She must’ve done herself up. Wyatt glanced up, thinking he heard footsteps—but nothing. Not yet, anyway. It was only a matter of time until the projections found him, and then he’d have to keep the others all safe until he could give them the kick using some well-timed explosives.

Some of Lucy’s hair was in her face. Wyatt pushed it back, tucked her hair behind her ear.

“Wyatt.” Jess crouched down next to him.

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“Of course you are.” Jess took his hand, intertwining their fingers. “It’s time to forgive her, wouldn’t you say?”

“I—”

Jess tugged on his hand and he looked up into her face. “You could have walked away. You can’t blame her for your own choices.”

“She set us up, Jess.”

“And you failed to learn about the militarization. And how many mistakes did you make with me?” Jess gestured at herself. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Wyatt blew out a breath. “This is the last time you’re going to be here, isn’t it?”

Jess cocked her head. “Well, why would I stay? You don’t need me anymore. You have him.” She jerked her chin towards Flynn. “And you have her.” She looked down at Lucy.

Wyatt swallowed. “Not sure I ever had her.”

“You did. And you could, again. If you can let go.”

A journal was in Jess’s hands now. Wyatt’s stomach flipped.

“Wyatt is obsessed with Jess,” his wife recited.

“Stop that.”

“He needs to learn to let go and move on.”

“I said stop.”

The journal disappeared. “You can’t forget it. I’m you. I’ll always remember, even if you try and bury it. What Lucy wrote, what Flynn found and read to you. It’s true, you’ve always known it’s true. You can’t ever let go, honey.”

Jess took his face in her hands. “Not me, not your father, not Flynn, not Lucy. You have to let it all go, or you’ll never get to have them, not truly.”

“I’m scared.”

“I know, honey, I know.” Jess kissed his forehead, and Wyatt closed his eyes, feeling almost like he was receiving a benediction. “But I think Flynn’s proven he’ll catch you.”

“And Lucy?”

“Well, what is love, Wyatt, if not a leap of faith? If you jump… then there’s the hope that she’ll jump after.”

Wyatt opened his eyes.

Jess was gone.

 

* * *

 

World War II on a battlefield was… well. World War II on a battlefield.

Flynn kept an eye on Jiya and Lucy, missing Wyatt already, honestly not as concerned for Denise as he knew he should be. Lucy was… Lucy, and Jiya reminded him too much of Iris. He had to make sure both of them were safe.

“How do we get to Temple’s safe?” Mason asked.

“Through the battlefield,” Lucy said. “These are his projections. They’re going to try and keep us from reaching the safe. Are you ready?”

Mason nodded, looking a bit shell shocked. “As I'll ever be.”

“You good?” Flynn asked Denise, who was coughing again.

Denise nodded grimly.

Fuck. Flynn didn’t say it out loud, but—it was only a matter of time until she ended up in Limbo, if you asked him.

But if Denise ended up in Limbo, there went Lucy’s chance of getting home.

They had to pull this off.

Jiya did a fair job of fighting the projections, but it was Flynn and Denise doing the heavy lifting as the soldiers. “It’s in the tent!” Mason said. “I can feel it!”

“Good, good work!” Lucy replied. “Let’s go!”

“Flynn…” Denise coughed up more blood.

Flynn grabbed her, supporting her, holding her up as Denise collapsed. “Lucy, she’s going to fall into Limbo!”

They got Denise across the battlefield, into the tent, a safe sitting snug in the middle.

“Open it,” Lucy instructed Mason.

Denise slumped down completely in Flynn’s arms.

 

* * *

 

Everyone else was sleeping on. Wyatt gently took Lucy’s hands and folded them over her chest. “I’m sorry, for my part,” he whispered. “For enabling you, for not stopping you, for not saying no. I think I… Luce I think part of me liked you helpless and that’s fucking shitty of me. I liked taking care of you and helping you and after Flynn left—you were all I had and I wasn’t healthy about it, and I’m sorry.

“Maybe Flynn was right and I should’ve left. Should’ve said this was unhealthy and that I wasn’t going to watch you spiral. But I couldn’t leave you. I can’t. And I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry I helped—make things worse. Flynn should’ve been here, not me, I’m sorry you got me, but… for what it’s worth I still love you. I never stopped. And if you can ever—if you can ever let go and move on, then I’m still here. We both gotta move on, Luce. We gotta let go.”

He squeezed her hand. “We gotta let go,” he whispered.

Outside, there was the sound of footsteps.

Wyatt stood up, drawing his gun. The explosions were timed to go off soon, but until then, he had to keep the others from getting shot.

Time to fight some redcoats.

 

* * *

 

Mason crouched down in front of the safe. Punched in the combination. Swung it open.

“I’ll drop down into Limbo,” Lucy muttered. “I’ll get Denise.”

“It’s not safe,” Flynn replied quietly. “I’ll go. Your mind—”

“Amy will hurt you.”

“And she won’t hurt you?”

Jiya was the only one watching as Mason saw what was in the safe.

Rufus’s science fair project.

Flynn turned—and she heard him yell. “No!”

Jiya whipped around in time to see Amy step in, firing, striking Lucy.

Flynn struck back, hitting Amy square between the eyes, but Lucy was already on the ground, blood leaking out. Flynn crouched down and pressed his hands to the wound. “Lucy, Lucy, _moja ljubav_ , no, no, hey, stay with me, I’m not losing you down there.”

“It’s—it’s okay—”

“No, no it’s not okay. Amy will be down there, Amy will hurt you—she’ll trap you—”

“It’s okay…” Lucy slumped in Flynn’s arms.

Jiya clapped her hands over her ears at the scream that Flynn made.

“I’ll get her.” The words were out of her mouth before she could even think about them. “I’ll get her, Flynn, I promise I’ll get her.”

 

* * *

 

Lucy woke up on the couch.

“Sleeping in again?” Mom was standing by the door—Mom, healthy, smiling, blonde hair framing her face. She dyed her hair a lighter blonde than it was naturally—it was closer to Amy’s burnt gold than spun corn—but it was a good look on her. “Honey. Honestly.”

She walked over, picking the history books up off the floor. “You work yourself too hard.”

“They took away my tenure,” Lucy grumbled. “I had the meeting all set up, and then fucking _David_ …”

Carol walked over, sitting down next to her. “Well, I’m supposed to go to the base today… why don’t you come with me?”

“Mom…”

“I know, I know, you want to be a historian. But you’d be so good at building worlds, Lucy. Your knowledge of history would really help you. We want to base the levels of the dream in actual historical places, to make them more believable. And I’m being spread thin, running administration and being the architect for all of this.”

“I’m not you.” Lucy drew the couch’s throw blanket up around her shoulders, shrinking in a little.

“Of course not. But you have greatness inside of you, Lucy. You just need to maybe try channeling it in a different way. It’ll be a change of pace, anyway.”

That was Mom. Always pushing her, always gently steering her life and molding her into what she wanted for her. Expecting genius in her to the point where the pressure felt unbearable, like being trapped in a sinking ship.

Or a sinking car.

 

* * *

 

“What are you doing!?” Flynn shouted. “Jiya, listen, you’re good. You are really, really good. You can see sides of a dream that nobody else can—”

“I can see every level, Flynn. It’s like—like forbidden colors. I can see Wyatt, I can see Rufus, and I can see you, and I can see Limbo. You go after her and she’ll never believe it’s you. You know it! Let me do this, Flynn, I can do this!”

 

* * *

 

She was trapped, the dream had gone wrong and she was panicking, she was in a car in the river and it was sinking and she couldn’t get out and she couldn’t breathe—

The glass broke, a hand—two hands pulling her out, Flynn carrying her onto shore, both of them dripping wet, cradling her, _shh, shh, Lucy, I’ve got you, it’s okay_ , shooting her out of the dream with all the gentleness of a lover, yelling at Carol afterwards, _your own daughter, what kind of—_

 

* * *

 

Jiya grabbed the gun and nodded at Flynn. To his surprise, he pulled her into him, hugging her.

“You shouldn’t have to do it yourself,” he told her. His large hand cradled the back of her head, and Jiya was suddenly reminded of her father and how he would hold her and rock her as a baby. Her mother was a good mother, a good woman, but not very tactile. Her father had been the hugger in the family.

“I’ve got you,” Flynn told her, and Jiya felt oddly comforted as the cool metal of the gun pressed to her temple.

 

* * *

 

Lucy stood outside her hotel room, Flynn next to her. “I have to go back home,” she said quietly.

“You don’t have to dictate your life around her,” Flynn replied.

Lucy rolled her eyes. “You can keep doing jobs while I’m gone, Flynn. You don’t need me. Wyatt—”

“I don’t give a damn about Wyatt,” Flynn snapped suddenly, his voice low and rough, almost a growl. “That’s not why I’m here.”

Lucy stared up at him, her mouth falling open a little. There was something in his eyes—those green, enigmatic eyes, his face once so closed off and harsh to her now soft and painfully open—

“Why are you here?” she asked.

She knew, or thought she knew—and somehow she knew what was about to happen. That this was the moment that everything changed, or could have changed, between them. The moment she could have taken the plunge and been with him but she’d let her mother take precedence, she’d let Wyatt interrupt them, she’d found excuses because she had been terrified of the devotion she’d seen in Flynn’s face.

How could she be worthy of devotion like that?

And then it all unspooled in front of her, Carol sick and dying, Amy desperate to dream to connect with her mother, feeling guilty for rebelling all those years even as Lucy felt guilty for not rebelling enough, both sisters seeking an equilibrium with their mother that forever slipped beyond their grasp, dreaming so much, too much, leaving all those things unsaid between Wyatt and her and Flynn—thinking that it would all be settled after Carol was dead, she’d deal with it once her mother was gone—and then Amy, _Amy_ …

She would never get another moment with Flynn. This was all she had.

She wouldn’t blow it this time.

Flynn wet his lips, made as if to answer—a lie, an excuse, an evasion, who knew—she didn’t give him the chance.

Lucy stepped forward, got up onto her toes, and kissed him. Soft, just a press of lips on lips, just enough that she could feel his face heating up. Flynn froze, so she pressed in harder, more insistent, she wanted this, he had to know she _wanted_ this, she wanted this so badly…

As she continued to kiss him, Flynn tentatively placed his hands on her hips. When she pulled back for air, he whispered, the word barely more than a breath, “Lucy…”

“Shh.” She kissed the corner of his mouth, soft and quick. “I should have done this so much sooner.”

Flynn’s hands convulsed around her hips, instinctively holding her more tightly. “Lucy— _moja ljubav_ —you—we—”

“We can have this.” She rested her palm on his chest and Flynn shuddered like he was a statue of ice and she was taking an icepick to him. “We can, Garcia—”

She cut herself off, kissing him again, and this time Flynn responded, kissed her back. Lucy grabbed onto him, pressing into him, as Flynn started to lift her up so he could kiss her properly, get a better angle for it.

“I love you.” It felt like if she didn’t say it now she never would, like their love would sour and rot inside of her chest, the rope between them binding them frayed and black and moldy. She had to say it now, she had to take her chance. “I love you, I love you—” She got her arms around his neck, she never wanted to let him go. “I love you—”

At some point they ended up in the room, she wasn’t sure how, Flynn lifting her like she was nothing. His hands were all over, dexterous and firm but careful, so careful, trembling here and there as she urged him to explore her. Lucy pulled him down on top of her on the bed, yanking at his clothes, but Flynn pulled away and slid down her body instead, undoing her jeans. She’d been lazy that day, wearing an oversized plaid button-up shirt and high-waisted jeans, her hair loose, and oh, God, she was so grateful for it now as Flynn easily yanked her jeans down and spread her legs, practically ripping her buttons open so that he could kiss along her stomach, up to her breasts, back down again, sucking at her hip.

“Garcia…”

“Shh, let me, let me.” Flynn kissed the top of her thigh and then moved between her legs, slowly licking through her folds, taking her from damp to properly wet as he methodically worked his tongue along her, in her, against her. He touched her clit sparingly, just enough to draw her higher up but not enough to really bring her relief.

Lucy sank her hands into his hair, tightening her hold when Flynn gave a small noise of approval. One of his large hands planted on her thigh, keeping her leg pinned to the bed, splayed wide, while his other hand slipped inside her, his fingers curling, questing, and she was yanking at his hair properly now, her hips jerking roughly up into his mouth and fingers.

Flynn smirked against her slick skin and began to hook his tongue right into the spot that made her mewl, bitten-back cries starting to leave her regularly now. God she was close, she was so close, he was relentlessly touching her, she could feel her thighs, his hand, and the bed under her all getting soaked, his stubble scraping along her skin, she felt like she was going to shake apart—fuck—

Lucy bit her lip so hard it bled and it still couldn’t quite muffle the sound she made as Flynn sealed his mouth around her and she fell, plummeted, off the edge. Her fingers trembled, her legs, all of her was trembling, as he crawled back up her body, kissing slowly like he was savoring her, like he could taste her orgasm on her skin.

“Garcia…” She tugged at him with fumbling, trembling fingers, clumsy in the aftershocks, finally coaxing him up to kiss her. She could taste herself on his tongue and another shudder worked through her.

“We can…” Flynn seemed about to pull away, like he was fine if that was all she wanted, but she could feel him hard against her hip and she wanted—she did want—she needed him—

“Fuck me,” she breathed into his mouth. “If—if you want it, I mean, then please—”

Flynn closed his eyes, his hips jerking, and he looked like he was struggling not to just slide his cock into her right that second. “Yes. If you’re sure…”

“I’m sure. I love you, I want you, I’m sure.” She wanted to feel like there was no separation between them. For some odd reason she missed him—she saw Flynn every day and yet, it also felt like she hadn’t seen him in a year, maybe longer. It felt like she was desperate, would do anything, to have him stay in her arms forever.

Flynn ran his hands through her hair, held her face with impossible gentleness, kissed her over and over. Lucy hooked a leg around him. “Garcia,” she ordered, her voice sharpening.

That got him to move. His clothes were off faster than she could imagine, and then they were moving up the bed and he was sliding in, pressing up against every part of her, and Lucy dug her nails into his back as he adjusted, moving shallowly in her until she was used to him.

He was big—thank fuck—and it took her a minute of harsh breathing and remembering exactly how the whole ‘relaxing’ thing worked, but fuck if feeling him inside her like that, stretching her, didn’t make her want to fuck him like an animal.

Lucy kissed up his neck, sucking a little, letting his skin catch against her teeth. “You can move, sweetheart,” she told him, the endearment slipping out of her before she could stop herself.

Then again, she’d said she loved him, so.

Flynn kissed her temple, tugging at her hair, and he chuckled when he thrust into her experimentally and she moaned. She whispered instructions— _there, yes, harder, just like that, perfect_ —until he hit just the right spot and Lucy bit his lip, clawing at him.

“Don’t you stop,” she warned. “Don’t you dare, don’t you dare stop.”

Flynn kissed her over and over, getting her drunk on his mouth, and Lucy couldn’t have stopped him for anything. He seemed determined to get her off first, bracing himself with one hand so that he could slide the other down and touch her clit, but she’d already had one orgasm. She wanted to feel him losing himself inside of her.

Lucy tightened herself around him, twisted her hips, and Flynn groaned, jerking wildly. “That’s it,” she panted. “Just like that, come on, I want—I want you, please—”

Flynn lost all sense of rhythm and Lucy delighted in it. She wanted him to lose himself, she wanted that rush of power as he gave himself over to her…

“Good,” she praised breathlessly. “You’re so good, you’re doing so well, let go for me sweetheart, I love you—love you so much—”

She felt him coming inside of her and the rush of it pushed her over again, and she tumbled and fell and was caught and held and they curled into each other, held on tightly, clung like nothing could tear them apart.

 

* * *

 

Jiya found that Limbo was already well-built.

However long they thought they’d been here, Denise and Lucy had been busy.

Up on the other levels, she could see them if she just relaxed her mind, the others preparing to set off their kicks. Seconds, minutes for them, but hours for her. Days. Weeks.

Months.

She rolled her shoulders and started walking.

 

* * *

 

Lucy woke up to the smell of coffee.

Her bed was unfortunately empty, no warm arms around her, which simply wouldn’t do. She sat up, pushing the hair back out of her eyes, and found her plaid shirt, pulling it back on slowly.

“Morning.”

She looked up and found Flynn sitting on the edge of the bed, a coffee cup in his hand. “Here you go.”

“Thank you.” Lucy took the cup, glancing up at him through her lashes, feeling oddly shy. Flynn was giving her the dopiest, biggest grin, softening his entire face.

God, she was so in love with him.

“It was no trouble. You were a… gentle and responsive lover.”

Lucy snorted, nearly choking on her coffee. “If that’s what you consider gentle…”

Flynn laughed, covering his face with his hand as his entire frame shook.

When was the last time she’d seen him this happy? Flynn carried the loss of his wife and daughter for years, and had been the one constantly fighting back against the military for the way they pushed the rest of them to the point of psychological breakdowns. Flynn rebelled, Flynn fought for them, and he put on a smile to those he conned—he was the best forger for a reason—but being truly relaxed and happy?

Perhaps once or twice when joking with Wyatt… like the time they snuck off base to the local bar and Wyatt fell asleep against Flynn’s shoulder. Or when it was the three of them fresh off stealing and sharing the PASIV tech, drinking and giggling together in hotel rooms.

But not often.

Yet here he was. Smiling at her. Looking at her like she was the only thing in the whole room that existed. Looking—

Lucy saw her just as she put her arm around Flynn’s shoulders from behind, her other arm wielding the blade. “Amy, _no_!”

Amy stabbed, and stabbed, and stabbed, and Lucy screamed, the coffee spilling, burning her but she didn’t care—no no no no _no_ —

Lucy wrenched him from Amy’s grasp, pulled him to her. “Garcia, Garcia, sweetheart, look at me, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay—” Please no, _please_ no—

Amy still had the knife in her hand, blood spattered on her dress, the same dress she’d worn when she’d flung herself from the hospital roof. “He doesn’t get you. You don’t get him. You don’t get anyone. It’s just you and me. I won’t share you!”

Lucy clung to Flynn with everything she had, but she could feel him growing heavy and cold in her arms. “Stay with me, stay with me—Amy you can’t do this!”

Amy scoffed, her voice cold, her face hardened in a way it had never been in life. “He was never going to stay.”

“He was, he _was_ , I messed it up—he was going to stay—I messed up, I messed it up—” Lucy kissed Flynn frantically, her hands pressing into the wounds, as if that could make him stay, bring him back.

“Why do you think he never said he loved you?” Amy taunted. Oh, God, there was so much blood, _who knew the old man to have so much blood in him_ …

“He didn’t say it because you don’t think you deserve his love,” someone else said.

Lucy whipped around to find—

“Jiya?”

Jiya strode in, looking pissed as all get out at Amy. “I should’ve known you’d be here.”

Amy glared at the newcomer. “Go away. She’s mine. I get her.”

“No, you don’t.” Jiya looked over at Lucy. “Send her away.”

“I—I can’t, I’ve tried—”

Jiya looked around the room. “How many times have you lived this?” she said quietly, as if to herself.

“What?” Lucy didn’t understand.

The bed, Flynn’s corpse, the hotel room, it all vanished.

They were on the top of a hospital, Amy standing on the edge.

“Sleeping with Flynn,” Jiya clarified. “Reliving that night—you could’ve been with him but you were both scared, and you didn’t say anything, you let yourselves get interrupted. That’s the night you really regret, the night you would’ve done differently. But Amy… she always comes and kills him. Because you can’t let yourself have nice things.”

Lucy looked from Jiya to Amy and back again. “I don’t understand,” she said, her voice small.

Jiya sighed. “You’re in Limbo. This isn’t real.”

“But I’d…” _I’d know it was Limbo. I’ve been here before._

“Would you?” Jiya countered. “If you were so caught up in punishing yourself? For driving Flynn to leave, for losing Amy, for not being the perfect daughter? Or would you not be able to see the forest for the painful trees?”

Lucy’s breath came in fast and choppy, painful.

“I know what you did to Amy,” Jiya told her. “I could see it. I can see it. I don’t know if it’s my autism, or if it’s just me, or something else, but I can see—everything, even things I shouldn’t be able to see, when I’m dreaming, and I know, I _know_ what you did.”

Amy snarled but didn’t move, and Lucy thought her sister’s eyes looked scared.

“You were down in Limbo for fifty years,” Jiya said. “You lived out a whole life with your sister. Building whole worlds, going through history together. But you always remembered that it wasn’t real and she had forgotten. She locked that truth away.

“And you wanted to go home, to reality, but she didn’t. So you performed inception on her. You gave her an idea: that the world around her wasn’t real and she had to wake up.

“But that idea persisted, even after she really had woken up, even after she was in the real world, and you didn’t realize that. You didn’t realize that when you planted an idea, it’s like a parasite, it never goes away no matter how much you try to kill it. Once you gave her that idea, it didn’t last just so long as you were in Limbo. It kept up, even while she was awake.”

Lucy felt her vision blurring. “I never told Wyatt and Garcia,” she admitted. “I never told them—I couldn’t tell them—”

“That you murdered your sister,” Jiya finished. “That’s what you think isn’t it? That you murdered her.”

“Because I did. I gave her that idea, I murdered her—and my mom, I killed both of them, it was my fault she did that, it was my fault—”

“It wasn’t your fault!” Jiya shouted.

“Yes it is!” Amy countered. “You toyed with my mind like a doll, like a plaything, you used me as an experiment!”

“That isn’t Amy,” Jiya said. “The real Amy would never want you to think this about yourself. She was sunshine, that’s what Wyatt told me, she was sunshine. She wouldn’t want you to do this. Amy was sick, she was unwell—”

“I made her that way!”

“Well being supposedly fucked in the head is no excuse!” Jiya shot back. “I don’t know what caused me to be like this. I don’t know why my mind works the way it does. Maybe it’s because my mom drank too much orange juice when she was pregnant with me, who the fuck knows? But what I choose to do about things like sensory overload, that’s my choice. Mine. Nobody else’s.

“Amy could have chosen to listen to you and to get proper help. She could have chosen any number of things, and you can’t take her power of choice away from her by claiming it was all your fault. You have to forgive yourself. You can’t carry this around anymore, okay? You can’t.”

“And how do I know that I’m dreaming now?” Lucy countered. “How can I trust anything that you’re saying to me? What if this is just—what if this is my reality and the rest of it’s been dreaming, dreaming about being miserable, I don’t know—I don’t know what’s real anymore—”

“Your locket!” Jiya shouted, like it was a revelation. “Look at your locket, Lucy, you’ll know it’s true.”

Lucy stared at her, unsure, hopeful and doubting and terrified all at once.

“Don’t listen to her Lucy,” Amy said quickly. Her voice grew shrill. “Don’t listen to her!”

“There’s a picture of Amy in your locket, isn’t there?” Jiya said. “That’s your totem, it’s Amy’s picture in your locket. That’s why you look at it every time we come out of dreaming. That image isn’t there, her picture isn’t there when you dream, because you can’t bear to look at her, can you? You can’t bear to look at your dead sister’s face. In a dream you make the locket empty. Go on, go on and look!”

“Who are you going to trust, Lucy!?” Amy shrieked. “This random nobody or me, your sister, your precious baby sister!?”

“Look!” Jiya yelled. “Just look at the locket, prove me wrong! See if it’s empty!”

“Don’t you dare!” Amy cried out.

Lucy reached down and opened her locket.

It was empty.

Lucy looked up to see Amy still standing there, on the edge. She walked up to her slowly, then pulled her sister into her arms.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you too, Lucy.”

Lucy pulled back. “But you’re not her. You never were.”

It was so simple, in the end. The work of a mere moment. A heartbeat.

She pushed Amy off the edge.

Jiya stepped up next to her. “I trust you’ll find Denise?”

Lucy nodded.

“Good, because I gotta tell ya, even with Rufus’s batch this much somnacin is going to have me throwing up for the rest of the plane flight.” Jiya turned so that her back was to empty air, and she was facing Lucy. “They still love you, by the way,” she said. “You can still have them. They’d forgive you in a heartbeat—they both know grief.”

Then Jiya opened her arms and fell.

And Lucy went to find Denise.

 

* * *

 

Jiya died four times.

She fell, she landed, she fell, she landed, she fell, she landed, over and over, until her eyes opened and she was on a plane in the first class lounge.

Wyatt was sitting up, rubbing his head, as Rufus grinned at her from across the aisle, winking.

Flynn jolted awake, eyes frantically going to Lucy.

Wyatt caught Flynn’s gaze, followed it, and started to look worried. Jiya herself started to worry. What if Amy had come back? What if Lucy really did still feel held down by her guilt? What if…

Lucy’s eyes opened.

And then Denise’s.

Denise pulled out her phone to make a call as Lucy sat up, looking at Flynn, and then Wyatt. Flynn looked like he might burst into tears and Wyatt looked like someone had clocked him in the back of the head.

Jiya smiled to herself.

…and then she got up to run to the bathroom and throw up because goddamn, did she not like somnacin.

 

* * *

 

Mason woke up slowly, a bit groggy. Odd, that. He rarely slept so well on planes.

Must have had something to do with his dream.

It was a vivid dream, like the kind he’d had when he was misspending his youth and downing drugs and spending his fortune like the alcohol he’d had flowing at his parties. He hadn’t had one of those in years. He still drank a good stiff whisky occasionally, had a bit of wine in restaurants with dinner, but after…

After Rufus, he’d stopped all the partying.

Rufus. His boy, his son in all but name, he had been in the dream. God, he’d felt so real, more real than this bloody plane.

Should he call him? Could he? Was that bridge even mendable?

The Rufus in his dream had seemed to think so. But then, it was his own subconscious. Of course he wanted to repair things between them, and so his subconscious gave him a Rufus who felt the same.

Ah, well. Old age, and all that. Catching up with him, making him nostalgic.

Mason stretched and looked around the cabin, catching the eye of the flight attendant and nodding at her for a drink. “Water, please,” he told her. After a dream like that he needed to clear his head, as tempting as it was to ask for a good stiff drink.

He needed to break up Mason Industries. Get back to his roots. He’d thought that stretching farther, higher, searching to push the boundaries of what was possible, was the way to go. But did he really feel any better for it?

All this time, he should have been getting back to his roots. To what had built his industry in the first place. He’d gotten too big, let people like Rittenhouse tempt him, and Rufus would be so disappointed in him. Rufus _had_ been disappointed in him.

Mason wanted to be someone of whom Rufus could be proud. Rufus was who mattered, _family_ was what mattered. Not all the other… window dressing.

The plane was just touching down into SFO, as the captain announced. Ah, he’d slept longer than he’d thought. Lovely.

Mason thought he somewhat recognized the tall man who was struggling to get his luggage out of the overhead—but then he smiled awkwardly at Mason and Mason recognized him as the one who’d bumped into him pre-flight.

The brunette, who looked a little sick from the landing, also seemed vaguely familiar… but then, he’d seen them all before, as he’d gotten onto the plane.

Mason shook his head to clear it and made his way down to baggage claim. He only had a small suitcase, he liked to travel light…

He paused.

Standing at the greeting area was a familiar man, with a petite woman standing next to him. She had a face of harsh lines with fierce eyes, but she seemed nervous, biting her lip and shifting her weight.

Mason stared, and stared, and stared at the man.

“Rufus?” he said at last.

Rufus was holding a sign that said _Connor Mason_ on it, the way Mason’s driver was supposed to.

“Hey, Connor.” Rufus flashed him a small grin, sass in the middle but nerves on the edges. “Sorry to surprise you but I thought…”

Mason’s heart swelled and he crossed to Rufus, grabbing him and hugging him tightly. “Oh, my dear boy. I have missed you.”

Rufus froze for a second, then hugged him back. “I… I missed you too. I was really fucking angry with you but… but I realized how much I actually… you’re my family.”

Mason pulled back, looking at the girl. “And who is this?”

“This is, uh, Jiya, my girlfriend. She went to CalTech.” Rufus put his arm around her and Jiya gave Mason a small smile.

“I’ve heard so much about you,” she said. She held out his hand to shake.

Mason pulled her into a hug instead, as Jiya gave a squeak of surprise. “Thank you for looking after him.”

“It’s mutual,” Rufus protested. “I look after her, too.”

“Uh huh.” Jiya pulled back from Mason to look up at Rufus and oh, they really were besotted with one another weren’t they? Mason had never been one to fall in love himself but he had listened to Rufus’s many woes about how he was never going to find anyone and was destined to die alone devoured by wolves, and even if he didn’t want or feel something himself that didn’t mean he couldn’t bask in the happiness of others.

Rufus deserved to be happy, and if Jiya made him that way, then Mason had nothing but gratitude.

“Rufus.” He took Rufus by the shoulders. “I’m breaking up Mason Industries, cutting ties with Rittenhouse.”

Rufus blinked at him. “But—but you wanted—they were going to fund—”

“Doesn’t matter.” Mason squeezed his shoulders. “Listen, I know that I sound like a bad knockoff of _Love Actually_ right now, doing this in an airport, but I didn’t understand love until I met you. I don’t think I ever let you know how much you meant to me. I had whatever I wanted, whoever I wanted, but it was meaningless. Then I got you, and I was… so scared. Having a family is bloody terrifying. And I thought, once, that losing my company was the worst thing that could happen to me, and it was only—I’ve only just now realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was losing my family. That’s you, Rufus. You’re my family.”

Rufus gaped at him for a moment, and then quickly wiped at his eyes. “Yeah—yeah you’re my family too.” He grabbed Mason and pulled him in, hugging him tightly, and Mason felt a weight he hadn’t even realized he’d grown used to start to lift.

 

* * *

 

Denise hauled her suitcase out of the back of the taxi, her limbs heavy in that aching way that she got after long travel, after wanting to be home.

No sooner had she set her suitcase down on the sidewalk than she was barreled into and hugged from behind. “Mom!”

She turned, smiling at Olivia, her youngest. “Hey, sweetheart, was I actually missed?”

“You were gone forever this time,” Olivia pointed out. She was thirteen but seemed ready to play the child this evening, missing her mother, and Denise didn’t mind.

“I got your bag,” Mark said, coming down the steps with Michelle. Mark was fifteen and had shot up several inches in height since she’d last seen him. That more than anything brought home for her how long it had been since she’d been here.

Never again. It was all settled now.

Mark took her suitcase and she caught his face in her hands, kissing him on the cheek, always her baby boy no matter how old he got. Then she was swept up in the arms of her wife.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” Michelle whispered, holding on tightly.

Denise wrapped an arm around her and hung on for all that she was worth, her daughter still hugging her waist. “I’m not leaving,” she announced, pulling back so that she could kiss Michelle properly. “It’s all working locally from now on.”

“I don’t want to—”

Denise knew what Michelle was going to say. “I want this,” she said. And she did. She’d just watched so many combinations of broken relationships, haunted relationships, family who weren’t there for each other. She didn’t want that for her own wife and her own children.

“All right,” she said, looking down at Olivia. “I’m sure your mom’s cooked a fantastic dinner, you’d better go inside and wash up so we can appreciate it.”

Olivia would normally greet such news with a roll of the eyes, but this time she just squeezed Denise a little tighter before releasing her and following her brother into the house. Michelle hooked her arm through Denise’s, like they were out for an evening constitutional in Victorian England, and they followed.

“I was thinking,” Denise said, as they got inside and she could finally take off her damn blazer and shoes, “that I should call my mom.”

Michelle’s eyebrows rose. “Are you sure?”

Michelle had tried to convince Denise for years to reach out. _She’ll want to see her grandchildren, she’ll come around, she loves you._

But Denise had known she’d disappointed her mother by being a cop, by not marrying the man to whom she’d been promised, by so many other things. She hadn’t been able to face the ultimate rejection, distance preferable to the cold fury that she had been sure would greet her if she told her mother the truth.

_I like women. I have a wife. I have children with her._

Rufus and Mason, though… Lucy and her mother, and her sister, Wyatt and his wife, Flynn and Lucy and Wyatt all tangled up in each other…

She didn’t want to be haunted by the things she didn’t say, didn’t do.

“I’m sure,” she replied to Michelle. “She’ll put up a fuss but I know she’ll love the kids. And I—I want a proper relationship with her again.”

Michelle’s smile was full of relief. “I’m glad, honey. I really am. I think it’s all going to work out.”

Mark poked his head through the kitchen. “Mom? You coming?” The wobble in his voice betrayed that no matter how he tried to hide it, he’d missed her, too.

“I don’t know, am I?” Denise joked to Michelle under her breath, which made her wife smack her lightly on the arm. Raising her voice she added, “Of course, baby, here I come. I just was talking with your mom—we think it’s time I brought your grandmother over to meet you and your sister.”

Mark wrinkled his nose up in worry. “Will she like it?”

“She will,” Denise said firmly, releasing Michelle to walk over to him and hug him. “Who wouldn’t like a wonderful young man like you?”

Over his head she caught Michelle giving both of them a besotted smile, and felt her heart swelling. Her family, her beautiful, beautiful family, was right here.

She was home at last.

 

* * *

 

Lucy’s hands shook as she took her luggage off the carousel and set it on the ground. She’d made it through security, even with her stomach in knots. Nobody had stopped her. Nobody had questioned her.

She was finally free.

She should check into a hotel. Call up old acquaintances, start getting her life back on track, get back to the academia she’d had to leave behind.

But there was only one thing she could think about.

Lucy walked through baggage claim, suitcase rolling behind her, scanning the crowd. They’d gotten out ahead of her, and she’d had to carefully pretend that she didn’t know them when she’d caught glimpses of them, as Mason and Rufus and Jiya had all been moving along together. Mason was supposed to think that his dream was a result of his own subconscious, and that Rufus and Jiya being at baggage claim was a sign. If he saw Lucy and the others, well, they’d only been in his dream since he’d glimpsed them on his flight.

Now, though, Mason was gone, and she could talk to them—if only she could find them—

Her breath started to catch in her throat, everything going tight. What if they weren’t here? What if they didn’t want to be with her, what if they weren’t waiting, what if she’d truly messed it all up beyond repair, what if—

A group of college students moved out of the way and she saw them.

Flynn was laughing, holding a small bag of complimentary peanuts out of Wyatt’s reach, clearly taunting him with them as Wyatt grabbed a fistful of Flynn’s jacket and said something undoubtedly cranky and full of false frustration. Flynn’s hand fell to Wyatt’s hip, steadying him, and God, they looked so happy together Lucy’s heart ached.

As if she’d said something, made some noise, they both looked up.

Flynn lowered his arm, and Wyatt straightened up, as she walked over to them. “Hey,” she said, her voice soft and trembling slightly despite her best efforts.

“Lucy,” Flynn said, and oh, she loved how he said her name. He said it unlike anyone else in the world, turned her name into something special and she loved, she loved, she loved him with every broken sharp piece of her.

Wyatt shuffled his feet, looking up at her from through his lashes, his jaw ticking nervously.

“I know I fucked up,” she whispered. She couldn’t seem to make her voice get any stronger. “I don’t have an excuse. I took advantage of your feelings and I just let you give and give and I never supported you in return and I… I just… I’m sorry, and I know I can’t make up for it but if you could give me a second chance I’d do anything—”

Her words started to trip over each other, like running too fast and beginning to stumble but unable to stop, and Wyatt, shooting an agonized look at Flynn, pulled her in and hugged her.

A moment later she felt Flynn’s arm go around her as well, felt him press a kiss to the top of her head. “ _Moja draga_ ,” he whispered. “We were always just waiting for you.”

Lucy clung to them. “I love you,” she whispered. “I love you—so much, I’m so sorry, I love you so much.”

“We all screwed up,” Wyatt said, his voice rough. He cleared it. “But, uh, if you—I said I’d always be there and I meant it. For both of you.”

Flynn chuckled, and she heard him press a kiss to Wyatt’s temple. “I never stopped,” Flynn whispered to her. “I never stopped loving you.”

Then he was pulling away, and she made a small noise of loss, but his hand caught hers, and then she saw his other hand catch Wyatt’s, and he was pulling them through the baggage claim towards the sliding glass doors. “I think it’s time we left dreaming behind,” he said. “See what the waking world has for us.”

“Does it have you?” Wyatt asked. He then blushed furiously like he hadn’t meant to say that out loud.

Flynn grinned wickedly. “If you want me.”

Wyatt just nodded, apparently out of words.

Lucy gripped Flynn’s hand tightly, and then began to take the lead, dragging the other two behind her. “Then come on,” she said, and she strode forward—through the sliding glass doors—into the San Francisco sunshine.

Into the world.


End file.
